.S4 H47 
1985 



Books by James Herndon 

The Way It Spozed to Be 
How TO Survive in Your Native Land 
Everything As Expected 
SoRROWLESS Times 



^ Notes from a 
Schoolteacher 



James Herndon 




SIMON AND SCHUSTER 

NEW YORK 




'X 



SOME OF THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE IN THIS 
BOOK HAVE BEEN CHANGED. 



Copyright © 1985 by James Herndon 

All rights reserved 

including the right of reproduction 

in whole or in part in any form 

Published by Simon and Schuster 

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 

Simon & Schuster Building 

Rockefeller Center 

1230 Avenue of the Americas 

New York, New York 10020 

SIMON AND SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of 

Simon & Schuster, Inc. 

Designed by Irving Perkins Associates 

Manufactured in the United States of America 

10 987654321 

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 
Herndon, James, date. 

Notes from a schoolteacher. 

1. Education, Secondary — California — San Francisco 
Metropolitan Area — Case studies. 2. Junior high schools — 
California — San Francisco Metropolitan Area — Case studies. 
I. Title. 

LA245.S4H47 1985 373.794'61 85-8298 
ISBN: 0-671-54371-7 

The author is grateful for permission to reprint from A Wave by 
John Ashbery. © 1984 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of 
Viking Penguin, Inc. 



For Raoul Teilhet 



Contents 



Prologue: The Fountain 



11 



PART I A School Kit 

CHAPTER 1 Discontent 

CHAPTER 2 So, of Course, Finally I Did Turn 

the Water Fountain On 

CHAPTER 3 The Pendulum 

CHAPTER 4 Raffia 

CHAPTER 5 Plans 

CHAPTER 6 Of Time and Merit 

CHAPTER 7 A School Kit 

CHAPTER 8 Chanh 

CHAPTER 9 Pamela Brown 



41 

43 

49 
56 
60 
68 
76 
87 
90 
95 



PART II Some Good Schools 

CHAPTER 10 Summertime 
CHAPTER 1 1 Good Schools 
CHAPTER 12 Spring Training 



99 

101 
109 
114 



8 



CHAPTER 13 
CHAPTER 14 
CHAPTER 15 
CHAPTER 16 



Brim 
Naropa 

Black Mountain 
Gary and Alfred 



CHAPTER 17 Some Fast Learners 



121 
124 
130 
133 
139 



PART in Opening Day 

CHAPTER 18 Collective Bargaining 
CHAPTER 19 Opening Day 



143 

145 
155 



Epilogue: Swan Song 



164 



Is it enough 

That the dish of milk is set out at night? 

J OHN ASHBERY 



Prologue: The Fountain 



Experience is never categorical; what matters 
about it is always detailed and personal. 

— E DGAR FrIEDENBERG 



Last Friday, June 17, was the last day of school for this year 
at old Spanish Main Junior High. 

We teachers were not doing much. The seventh graders 
were gone. Yesterday was their last day and they had gotten 
their report cards and cleaned out their lockers and gone 
home early, in the usual hubbub of exchanges with teachers, 
wherein our most aggravating students told us that we were 
the best teachers they had ever had and we told our favorite 
students that we were shipping them off to the Falkland Is- 
lands or somewhere, to which they answered, Thank God! or 
some such — all of this according to a code developed and 
understood by teachers and students for a hundred years. 

The eighth graders were up at the high school, enduring 
graduation practice with the principal, vice-principal, coun- 
selor, several duty-bound eighth-grade teachers, and the band. 
We all knew what would happen there. The kids, although 

11 



12 Prologue: The Fountain 

dying to graduate and look right and to have everything go 
right and having spent money on hairdos and clothes and 
gotten tickets to the graduation for parents and grandparents 
and uncles and all, would be refusing to shut up and pay 
attention while the principal was trying to tell them what to 
do, since they had already practiced two days in a row here 
at Spanish Main and figured they knew what to do, although 
displaying right then absolutely no evidence that they did, and 
the principal's frustration would catch up with him and lots 
of yelling and shouted orders would go on, until mercifully 
the time would be up and the buses would carry everyone 
back in various kinds of bad moods. 

We knew all that. We sat in the teachers' room, talking, 
having coffee, and occasionally got up and went out to clean 
out our rooms, or turn in our First Aid Kit or our Grade 
Book or the Tierra Firma District Curriculum Guide, or to 
try to get the librarian to sign us out with our Library Inven- 
tory — all the important things which needed to be done and 
signed for if we were to be able to end the year, get our 
checks . . . 

We made plans to go to lunch. The kids, once back, would 
be freed at 12:01. We could go out to lunch then, although 
we'd have to come back to get our checks. When? Three-ten, 
the usual time we leave on a regular day. We check each 
other out. Three-ten? That's what He said. He is, of course, 
the principal. We have other names for Him on occasion, 
none flattering as to brains, competency, or style. He seems 
to work best for everyday usage. No, the union can't do any- 
thing about it. As usual, we protest to each other that it is 
unreasonable and unnecessary. There is nothing for us to do 
here. Besides that, there are only two or three days in the year 
when we get to go out to lunch, a long lunch together, drink- 
ing martinis and such and eating something other than our 
cottage cheese, fruit yogurt, sandwiches, or the school ham- 
burgers. We look forward to it, we plan to be very jolly, but 
we do not want to come back. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 13 

This turns our thoughts, inevitably, to the subject of Him 
and principals in general. We begin to make a pool on the 
time He will actually give out the checks. We speculate; will 
it be ten minutes early? Right at 3:10? Half an hour early? 
We know He wants to remain the boss, even — especially — 
on this last day when we might be tempted to take liberties, 
but we also figure He'll try to be a good guy too. But just 
how much good guy and still remain boss? We know that is 
going through his mind. Of course, if graduation practice 
was worse than usual, He'll be grimmer than usual, and that 
is a factor. 

Ever since — perhaps ten years ago, or twelve? fifteen? — 
principals began to be called "middle-management" and we 
teachers became "FTE's" (Full-Time Employees), we had 
seen these guys — men and women — struggling to be our bud- 
dies while still maintaining a suitable distance in order to be 
management. Being "a part of the staff" is, of course, no 
longer considered. It is a very difficult path to tread, and very 
few have ever been able to do it. Still, being "good guy," on 
occasion, is part of "management technique"; we teachers 
know that there is an administrative handbook telling prin- 
cipals how to do this — what ratio of good guy to boss — al- 
though we have never seen it. Even those of us with adminis- 
trative credentials have never seen it. It must be given out 
only after one actually becomes management. 

Actually, the up-and-coming term is Program Manager. 

We got the pool lined up, beginning at 2:45 and ending at 
3: 10, each minute, a dollar a throw. We decided to wait until 
the rest of us came back from graduation practice to finish it 
off. We began to laugh a lot; we regarded the pool as an act 
of sabotage. We knew He would hear about it, sometime dur- 
ing the afternoon. We also realized that, as an act of sabotage, 
it was, at best, minor-league. We're a pretty miserable lot, we 
told each other, if that's the best we can do! Still, we weren't 
seriously depressed. We understand, tacitly, that in order to 
really cause Him trouble, we would have to cause trouble 



14 Prologue: The Fountain 

for the school itself; we aren't willing to do that, somehow. 
So we laughed again about what a sorry bunch we were, but 
we were pleased with ourselves anyway. 

There began to be remarks about other, earlier, middle- 
management ne'er-do-wells. We are a staff which has been to- 
gether, for the most part, for quite a few years. Those new to 
Spanish Main are not new to Tierra Firma School District, 
but are mostly former elementary-school teachers who, for 
one reason or the other, decided to brave the wilds of junior 
high. They told us again about principals they had worked 
with, for, or under, depending . . . and we brought up the 
succession of principals at Spanish Main and we remembered 
and reestablished the principle, developed a hundred years 
ago by teachers, to wit: do not attempt to rid yourself of your 
principal, no matter how bad you think he may he. They 
have another, much worse, waiting in the wings! 

These are last-day thoughts, not Spanish Main thoughts. 
Not unique. After all, there are fourteen more schools right 
here in Tierra Firma alone, all enduring the last day of 
school with its burden of a year's cares and troubles, each 
with its own Him, or, it may be, Her . . . 

Ten o'clock. We had another two hours with nothing 
much to do. There is no question that we are feeling the ten- 
sions, the upsets, the aggravations of the last days of school; 
today's questions add to it. We occasionally broke out of the 
teachers' room and journeyed out into the school, looking it 
over. I went to my room, Room 33. The thirty-six desks were 
shoved over to the side to make it ready for the summer 
cleaning crew. I opened the cabinets where the books had 
been put away, and immediately wished that they had been 
put away in a more orderly fashion. I remembered, too, that 
that thought had crossed my mind while we were putting 
them away. I believed it crossed my mind every year for the 
last twenty or so years. 

The only thing I had left to do in order to sign out and get 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 15 

my check and say adios for this season was to put in a Work 
Order for things that needed fixing. The darkening curtain 
was ripped in seven places. That was what Andy had told 
me, a day or two before. He counted the rips. Rent, I told 
Andy. The curtain is rent. No reason to say that, I just felt 
like it. It just barely worked for showing movies — educa- 
tional films, I mean (remembering years back when it was 
verhoten to say "movies") — but it really looked bad. "Get 
that curtain sewed up, Mr. Herndon!" kids are always saying. 
"Boy, it's really ugly!" 

Sew up darkening curtain, I wrote on my Work Order. The 
room has a high ceiling and the wall to the northeast is all 
window. You can see the Tierra Firma Shopping Center and 
a good deal of the rest of the place and, ten miles beyond, 
much of the city, including the Miro-like TV tower, near 
which I live. 

"Where do you live, Mr. Herndon?" kids ask every day. 
"See that tower?" I ask. Everyone abandons work to take a 
look at the tower. I fall for it every time. "That's where I 
live!" Quite a few kids then fall to arguing about whether I 
really live in, on, or about that tower. 

I believe I'm babbling. Well, it's the last day of the year, 
the season. I bet ballplayers babble in the same way. Just out- 
side the room is a strip of grass about twenty feet wide, run- 
ning the length of the school. It's a very pleasant room, I 
think to myself. The grass is full of gopher mounds and next 
to one of them a black-and-white cat is sitting patiently, wait- 
ing for a gopher to come out. Cats have sat there the last two 
or three — four? five? ten? — years, I reflect. We — students and 
I — have never seen them catch a gopher. God knows we have 
watched. The cats must come from the apartments right be- 
low the school. We can see into the apartment windows, at 
least those on the upper story, and girls are always claiming 
that some naked, perverted man is showing off in the win- 
dows. 



16 Prologue: The Fountain 

The grass strip is actually, now, a strip of foot-and-a-half- 
high dandelions, quite pretty, the result of a squabble be- 
tween school board members about the gardening contract. 

See, there was this old Tierra Firma outfit, a hometown 
Italian company, which did the gardening for the district for 
years and years. "I do it at a loss!" cried the old man at school 
board meetings. "At a loss! Just to do my part for the town 
and for the schools and for the kids! Because I live here!" 

But a couple of new members were elected to the school 
board, to whom anything connected with the old board and 
the superintendent was suspect, and they hired a new garden- 
ing company for a quarter of the amount, thus saving money 
for "educational needs," which naturally couldn't be argued 
with, but as it happened the new gardener was from another 
town, across the Bay! and was black, too, so then somehow 
the old guard got together and payment to the new gardener 
was blocked on the ground he wasn't doing the job, so of 
course, he stopped cutting the grass . . . 

I know all this because, as union president (Local 3267, 
American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, I'll just men- 
tion), I go to all the board meetings, and one thing you can 
see there, or you remember there, is that there really was an 
old Tierra Firma, a railroad-head cowtown before the city 
was anything much; then later a town of small farmers and 
greenhouses which supplied the city and the peninsula with 
cut flowers . . . and, of course, for the last thirty years there 
has been the new Tierra Firma with ro"\v on row of developer 
houses with backyards on curving streets, those houses once 
making a millionaire of Malvina Reynolds for the song 
"Little Boxes"; and that these two sides do not always get 
along. 

Now the gardener from across the bay knows that too. Still, 
years after Malvina, many of these same houses and streets 
look quite charming as I drive to work. The houses are the 
same — oh, maybe a den or an extra bedroom added on — but 
trees have grown up, flowers and vines grow and blossom 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 17 

wonderfully in the foggy weather and, in fact, little remains 
of the plastic look which one had predicted could only get 
worse. 

The above musing is not getting me out of here with my 
check. There is always a certain anxiety generated in a 
teacher on the last day, in particular. You have this damn slip 
of paper, dittoed off, upon which you must obtain signatures 
for doing right. The fact that you have been able to do so for, 
say, twenty years, does not help. Things may have changed 
this year without notice. I realize I'm not done with Work 
Order. 

Fix Drinking Fountain, I write on it. Now that's it for the 
Work Order. When I moved into this room four — five? six? 
seven? — years ago, the fountain didn't work. So I'm used to 
writing in Fix Drinking Fountain. Last summer it actually 
did get fixed, but after a month or so some kid stuffed 
ground-up crayons down its throat, which caused it, when 
turned on, to squirt a nice stream of water fifteen feet across 
the room into the laps and essays of students, who all 
screamed happily and who then had to be let out of the room 
to the bathroom to dry off because their shoes or jackets or 
pants or skirts were new or because they had just gotten over 
the flu anyway and couldn't risk pneumonia or who got to 
stand up angrily and swear that there was no way they were 
copying this ruined work over, usually crumpling up the wet 
work so that no investigation of it by me would be pos- 
sible . . . 

No worry about time lines here. This particular squirting 
fountain was this year. My own reaction was normal. I put 
up with it all one day, got a wrench from the shop teacher 
after school, and turned it off. That act was discovered by the 
very first kid who came into my first-period class. He knew it 
was turned off before he even tried it. We are used to that 
clairvoyance in school. 

There followed, all day long, students trooping up to me 
to tell on old Andy. I already knew Andy did it. We all did. 



18 Prologue: The Fountain 

I didn't see Andy do it, and I doubt they did. Well, maybe 
some of them did. We all knew anyway. Andy did it. 

I took it all as occasion for a Discussion. It went much 
better than most of my lecture/discussions, because the sub- 
ject was important. The kids' question was, "When are you 
turning the water back on?" Everyone paid attention. It was 
Learning. 

"Never!" I said. 

"Well how are we going to drink water then?" 

"I don't know," I said, "and I don't care. I don't want a 
drink." 

"Well, we do!" 

I shrug. By this time I have everyone's attention, every 
class, all day, and realize without any guilt at all that I am be- 
ginning to have a good time. Everyone, for once, listens to 
me, I point out that I didn't sabotage the fountain. 

"Andy did!" they cry, selling him out, also without any 
qualm at all. Andy is sitting right there. 

They know the score. I am to punish Andy and then, justice 
being served, turn the water back on. I ain't going to kill 
Andy, after all. Andy says nothing. They fire on, full of sug- 
gestions; now the discussion, they figure, is over. Michael (the 
custodian) will fix it. Call Maintenance! 

Well, you can see ho^v the rest of it goes. I didn't sabotage 
the fountain, I repeat, and neither did Michael and neither 
did Maintenance, and furthermore neither of them need to 
drink water from this fountain. (But ive do!) So when you 
fix it so it doesn't squirt out fifteen feet anymore, I'll turn it 
back on! We have approached a stalemate. 

Teachers don't win many stalemated negotiations, in my 
experience, but I have the upper hand in this one. Some kids 
fool witii the fountain for the next few days, without result, 
and some can be heard exhorting Andy to fix it, or they'll 
have to take action. They point out (I can hear them, al- 
though officially paying no attention) that he, Andy, has 
acted against their own welfare. The fountain is important in 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 19 

their school lives; when they can't stand to sit there one mo- 
ment longer, even the best students can say to themselves, 
I'm just going to get a drink! They get to get up, walk, 
move — ^just for a second. It is often enough. 

They point this out to Andy. 

"Mr. Herndon" — (I hear them saying) — "don't care! Come 
on, Andy!" Nothing at all happens, though, because Andy 
will not move at all, and because everyone in the class likes 
Andy, troublesome or not, including me. 

There is quite a bit of commentary in the media (once 
again!) about Education, which, I guess, is nice to see. Is the 
above Learning? Education? No, I think not, although in the 
late sixties many of us thought it was, or at least that this 
kind of discussion had something to do with morals, the 
world, real-life, responsibility, Existenz ... no one learned 
anything from the above, because we already knew all about 
it to begin with. What we were doing was pointing out to 
each other, once again, for the thousandth time, what the 
score was, the rule, the point, the upshot of things ... a 
lesson, in itself maybe valuable, certainly interesting, perhaps 
crucial, and unquestionably fun for all. 

Pointing out. The papers, the media, the new state super- 
intendent (of California), the (California) Round Table of 
Concerned Businessmen, well, jiick them, I begin to think, 
perhaps a little pointing out might be just the thing, maybe 
they could use a little . . . hold it! I tell myself, let's get the 
hell out of here first. 

Take a last look at the room, looks OK, turn the key, and 
gone. Gone for only a little while, sure; come back next year 
and see about it once again. 

Of course, for all my teacher power, the kids won in the 
end. Having no water to drink available in the classroom, the 
result of my hard-hearted stance, they had to go out to drink 
water, out into the halls. But generally, the halls are for- 
bidden during class time. We can't have all these rascals 



20 Prologue: The Fountain 

roaming the halls, causing trouble. Now, to my lucky stu- 
dents, I've added another real reason to go out and roam — 
we have to drink water! 

I'm quite annoyed, but it's not entirely about the foun- 
tain; the kids know I'll let them out to "drink water" (and 
that I'll forbid it too, once in a while, for no reason; I just 
feel like it!) and so that's fine and we get to enjoy the pre- 
tense that I am hard-hearted and tight. 

No, what I'm unaccountably annoyed by is this phrase "go 
drink water," which, I see, I've now written a few times. 
That's what the cholo kids say when they want to go get a 
drink of water. They say, "Mr. Herndon, can I (often, "May 
I") go drink water?" These damn girls — I have it in mind 
that it is always girls — come up to me and say, "May I go 
drink water?" 

It hits me every time. They all write and read English, 
spell fine, many do good and get good grades, but — whether 
they were born in the city or in Nicaragua or El Salvador or 
Peru — I want them to say. May I go get a drink! Spozed to go 
that way. Can I go get a drink! Not this May I go drink 
water! ... I never bring it up, of course, but it drives me 
crazy. I'm no different, I tell myself, from all the old-lady 
Italian teachers in the city who used to bitch about bilingual 
classes, saying, My parents never spoke English, / had to learn 
English to survive, so why in hell can't they? 

Cholos. When I was growing up in L.A., if you ever said 
the word cholo when some actual cholos were around, you 
were in for real trouble. Now, cholos describe themselves 
proudly as cholos. Now that points out . . . 

Later for the cholos. I have things to do. I go down to the 
main office and turn in my Work Order and get my sheet 
signed by the secretary. I scan the sheet; everything is signed 
for except the library and the principal (room in order). He 
is up at the high school trying to get the students to practice. 
I head for the library. 

Usually the librarian — actually the library aide — gives you 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 21 

an inventory sheet of all the books you ought to have and you 
take it, have someone (not Andy!) count up how many books 
you actually have, and then, since you never have the right 
amount, you invent how many to put under Lost, Missing, or 
Discarded. I never had any trouble with that. 

But this year, there is no inventory. We are supposed to 
make out our own list! I'm annoyed again — how come every- 
one gets to stop doing their job except us, the teachers? 

Well, this year the board cut the library aide's hours in 
half, in response to the superintendent's recommendation to 
cut out the librarian and the clerk (which is what he recom- 
mends every year). So that's why. . . Still, the union went 
to bat for the librarian's job and the clerk's and in fact claims 
some credit for their reinstatement and so teachers shouldn't 
have to do their job, and indeed (as may already be clear) I 
haven't done my own inventory and it's too late now . . . 

Anyway, the librarian isn't there. She's up at graduation 
practice. How come? He made her go, says the clerk. 

But never mind. Yesterday the seventh graders had to 
scurry around to make sure their lockers were cleaned out, 
to make sure they found lost jackets, found or paid for or told 
plausible lies about lost books and P.E. locks in order to get 
checked out so that they could get their report cards. 

On my way back to the faculty room, I run into Harold. 
Harold is also scurrying around. He asks me if I've seen the 
librarian. Now I know that Harold has every book accounted 
for since the beginning of time, that he has none lost, strayed, 
or stolen. Still, he's anxious. He has only been teaching 
school for thirty-five years, more than twenty of them here. 
Besides that, he is quitting. Retiring. This is it! he told me, 
swearing me at the same time to silence. He doesn't want any- 
one to know. No retirement parties, no gold watch, he says. 
Still, everyone knows. That's OK with Harold too, so long as 
no one says anything to him about it. At the same time, he's 
worried about getting his ditto sheet signed. 

In the teacher's room, we speculate about when they'll get 



22 Prologue: The Fountain 

back from graduation practice. We want the pool filled up. 
We are quite gay; a cameraderie is present which we rarely 
have and we indeed love it. The mention of graduation, how- 
ever, encourages some to speak with a certain bitterness. 

First, there was the promise that really bad, worthless stu- 
dents would not be allowed to graduate from the stage. As we 
speak, we all feel that it is silly and fear we may sound vindic- 
tive. Actually, we are feeling vindictive for the moment and 
may have felt so for the past — oh, three weeks, as the season 
ran down, 

I put everything I had on the line for that little asshole! 
(this is the kind of thing we say today) — tried to show him he 
could do it if he just would do it and by God he could, he 
did! I saw it! and gave him all the leeway I could in the 
world and when that didn't work got tough and kept him 
after to do his work — and he can do it, goddammit! sure, if 
he was just plain dumb, then OK, OK! but he's not . . . had 
his parents in, they'll straighten him out! of course! and then 
suddenly it's the last month of school and it's still the same 
old horseshit and Hey! I realize I've got the rest of this class, 
probably most of them not as smart as he is, trying their best 
and I've probably neglected them and so I finally say to my- 
self, Well, to hell with you, kid! and I talk to Him and He 
says these kids can't be allowed to graduate from the 
stage . . . 

Change. We all read, every day now in the papers, hear 
every day on the TV, about change in the schools, reforms, 
higher standards of discipline, incompetent teachers, more 
money. The above will show you the only change I'm aware 
of — we teachers now curse a lot, openly. Five — six? seven? — 
years ago I first heard an extremely respected and respectable 
woman teacher come into the faculty room and say loudly. 
Shit! and then, after a pause, and double-shit! That was a 
signpost, an icebreaker, and since then we all, male and fe- 
male, respected and respectable or not, feel free to say "bull- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 23 

shit" and "asshole." That does not appear to be the change 
the media are talking about. 

We're a bit beaten down. We're all ready to say the same 
thing — to wit, we don't give a damn if the worst student in 
the school graduates from the stage. Just say so — fine with 
us. Everyone graduates! They're all going up to high school 
anyway, whether they officially graduate or not. 

That's our official stand, true or not. But we can't stand it 
that we get "standards" agreed upon, in fact, laid on us with- 
out any real consultation anyway, and so we lay these stan- 
dards on the kids and in the end the standards are thrown 
out the window and the kids say. You see? 

We say it too, here in the faculty room, with an hour left 
to go until noon. 

Well, someone says. He says that many of these kids aren't 
going to finish high school anyway, and so this will be their 
last chance to graduate with their parents watching and . . . 
Fine! we interrupt. Fine with us! Then just say so at the out- 
set! We don't need this hypocritical bvillshit! We don't need 
this club over the kids. We can handle them, even if He 
can't. All we need is just, one time, a simple statement of 
policy which turns out to be true. 

Anyway, says Joe, He told someone up at the office that the 
reason we have graduation at night up at the high school is 
because His Teachers want it that way! 

This is a bombshell. What? What? He said what? . . . 
who told you . . . heard it from . . . and the school secre- 
tary . . . that's the way all information comes to us in the 
district — anyway, that's what He said. 

We all hate that. We hate everything about it. First of all, 
we don't want to be His Teachers. We don't want the kids to 
graduate up at the high school at night. It's too pretentious, 
it forces the parents to spend too much money, and most of 
the parents don't have much money. 

We don't get to see the kids dressed up and graduating. 



24 Prologue: The Fountain 

which we've always liked. The kids always graduated nicely 
in folding chairs out on the blacktop, the parents sat in more 
folding chairs, it never rained once in twenty years, and by 
noon it was over and done with and was quite OK, nice, 
even. That's how we've always done it, until this . . . 

We don't get to see it because we're not going up there at 
night, on principle! His first year, He held a faculty meeting 
to discuss graduating at the high school at night. The faculty 
voted against it, unanimously. The result was that we held it 
at night, and that He stopped consulting us. That first gradu- 
ation, tiie superintendent called me up and said he was sur- 
prised to hear that no teachers showed up for graduation. I 
told him it was because we'd been asked our opinion, voted 
against it and that, since we couldn't be made to go, we 
didn't go. 

As time went on, some teachers showed up at graduation, 
voluntarily, out of a sense of — well, what? Responsibility to 
the kids, seemed to be it. Some of us feel these teachers are 
selling us out. If no one ever showed up, we say, He'd have 
to knock it off with these damn graduations. Maybe not 
though, others argue. A whole litany of exasperation follows. 
After all, He thinks it's His school, His students. His parents. 
His teachers. His buildings. His diplomas . . . and it's 
damn sure His graduation! Well, then let Him do it! 

There are eight or ten of us here in the teachers' room. We 
sit around tables with coffee, sit at certain tables at which, 
^vith few exceptions, we have sat all year, perhaps for several 
years. We are more of a solid group today than we usually 
are. Now someone laughs. It is Maggie. 

No point in all this, she says. It's not like it's anything new. 

We are reminded that these same subjects come up on this 
last day every year. They are exactly the same. Nothing has 
ever been done about them. It's safe to say nothing ever will, 
or can, be done about them. Nothino- will, or can, be done 
about almost everything that really drives us crazy in our 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 25 

lives as teachers. No matter how we perceive the school, no 
matter what we think about how the education of junior 
high students should go, no matter what we think about how 
to deal with the students who don't make it in our school, or 
the kids that do make it — and our opinions on these subjects 
are anything but unanimous — we know that nothing real 
will ever be done to change or even ameliorate these condi- 
tions. They are permanent. 

Still, we go on talking about them for a bit; it is the last 
day. We bring up all of our discontents, perhaps just to take 
a look at them. We mention textbooks, sillier every year, 
more expensive, cheaply bound so that they fall apart. We 
speculate on next year's schedule of classes, which for the last 
three years has appeared before us on opening day so entirely 
screwed up that it took five weeks of changing kids and entire 
classes around before school was even operable — His sched- 
ule, we of course point out, not forgetting to add that if we 
made lesson plans like that schedule, we would be, and 
should have been, fired on the spot. We bring up supplies 
(never have any) and class sizes (way too large, or Avhy is it 
that one class with thirty-six students sits right next door to 
another, same grade and subject, with twenty-three?) and the 
utility (or the reverse) of Chapter I, Title This-and-That, 
ESL and bilingual education, trying to remember what ex- 
actly each is about or for. We bring up reforms and our own 
exhaustion. 

A little silence takes over, as the above list provides us with 
a sinking sensation. We combat it, each silent and alone. It 
takes more than that to defeat us completely though; we are 
pros. We're all thinking the same thing, making our come- 
backs. 

We are the team here. Whatever is done here, we do it. We 
make the plays, we hit the ball, or no one does. So the man- 
ager claims it's His club — the owner says, "My club!" It ain't 
their club at all. Now we can look back and see that we had 



26 Prologue: The Fountain 

respectable seasons; had a reasonably low ERA, hit for a de- 
cent average, with not a few clutch hits. Made the plays most 
of the time. We begin to remember some good days. 

"You know what I really like about the last couple of 
weeks?" Clementine says it. Her tone changes our mood at 
once. She's going to say something we all feel and that we all 
like. Something true that we'll all like to hear. Someone al- 
ways does. 

It's when I can forget my lesson plan, forget worrying 
about homework coming in or not, when I know I've done 
my best, good or bad, who knows? done all I can do and I can 
just let go and play and talk with the kids I really like. I have 
a pretty good time then. You know, we never get a chance, 
not the whole year long, to really talk with the students, just 
talk about things, without worrying about the rest of the 
class, about discipline, are they getting the lesson? . . . 

Ho man, that's so true! Everyone is affected by that. The 
room breaks up into individual conversations for a bit as 
teachers tell other teachers about so-and-so and so-and-so who 
are great kids and what they said and what we said. We are 
all happy as larks, singing a cheerful tune. 

Indeed, before the last two weeks began, up came Mark 
and Juliette and Melinda and checked my grade book and in- 
quired as to their own grades and chattered about nothing 
much until finally the question came out, approached side- 
ways as if of no great importance. What if we didn't do this 
last week's assignment? Would we still get an A? Yes. 

That being agreed to, we can spend the last two weeks in 
pleasant and profitable conversation, rewarded as we are, 
quite properly, for having done right all year. 

The rest of the class is split into two groups. There are 
ne'er-do-wells who have awakened to the fact that they are 
going to have to take report cards home shortly and suddenly 
wish to escape retribution. They now want to do "extra- 
credit" work. For them, after an appropriate amount of lec- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 27 

turing, pointing out how they got themselves into this fix 
(along with the irony of doing "extra-credit" while having 
neglected to do the "regular" assignments) — I produce a 
number of ditto sheets which they now actually begin grind- 
ing out, huddled together with the dictionary, atlas, and the 
textbook, working, planning to take home a C instead of a D 
minus. 

Another smaller gioup of real, antischool hardliners are 
occupied with "cleaning up." It is their turn to do right. 
Andy is supervising the careful taking down of papers from 
the walls, passing them back to their authors if present, the 
cleaning out of desks, the removal of staples, and the orderly 
putting away of books. Andy has not exactly volunteered for 
this work; he simply iri formed me that he -^vas going to orga- 
nize this activity. It is not his fault that I now wish the books 
had been put away in a more orderly fashion. Andy would 
have done it and made others do it. It is I who haven't the 
will, these last two weeks. A certain amount of disorder is 
produced at first, between Andy and Charmaine, who wants 
to help but only if she is boss. I am pretty slick at this kind 
of thing by now, though, and send Charmaine oiuside on 
important errands. Given no direction by me, Andy has had 
the books arranged in stacks according to size, which makes 
the stacks look very neat. 

Actually, the entire aspect of class has changed. I'm only 
thinking of one particular class here, but it's the same with 
the rest of the day. 

Andy and his group of antischool demonstrators have be- 
come desirable workers. They want to do what they are doing, 
and can see the benefit, the virtue, of their work. They are 
not concerned, it seems, with report cards. Andy lets me know 
that I should have let him take care of the classroom all year 
long. He implies some disdain for my ideas of order, even 
my capability for such order. 

Yeah, but I can't, I couldn't, Andy, because you're sup- 
posed to be doing your schoolwork first, and you never did it. 



28 Prologue: The Fountain 

Andy shrugs. He can't get through to me, can't make me 
understand, his shrug says. We both forget about the foun- 
tain. How's the room looking? he asks. Fine, Andy, fine! I tell 
him. Andy is from Peru. He reads well. His writing is fine, 
his English fine. His "skills" are fine. Could we start over? 
Well, clearly not. 

But anyway, the real bad guys are doing solid work. The 
repentent ne'er-do-wells are slaving over the ditto sheets. Say, 
Mr. Herndon, says Mark, who has been roaming the room 
overseeing the latter effort, don't you think those ditto sheets 
are kind of meaningless? 

He goes on to explain, not meaning any insult, I mean, we 
had that stuff all year! 

Well, OK, Mark, but these guys haven't done that stuff 
all year. 

Well, yeah. Mark is unconvinced. He reminds me that we 
never had ditto sheets all year. We had to write essays. 

I remind him of the change in circumstances; it is the last 
two weeks. 

Juliette is Indian, by way of Africa and Fiji. How can any- 
one just sit here all year and do nothing? she wants to know, 
talking about the ditto-sheet workers. I mean, it's so boring! 

Well, what are you doing right now? I say. You're just sit- 
ting around doing nothing. If you're so bored, start doing 
the ditto sheets. Who was it asked me if they could forget 
about schoolwork this week? Are you bored? 

See, Juliette! says Melinda. Melinda is Chinese. Mark is 
Polish. Yeah, Juliette! he says. They go off together to discuss 
this new insight. They roam around, stopped continually by 
workers to give out answers to questions which cannot be im- 
mediately found in dictionary or atlas. Soon they will be back 
to bait me, without any fear of retribution. We are comrades. 

In the faculty room, I think about it, the last two weeks, 
the change in the class. It's pretty good. I remind myself that 
it's only in a social studies class that this picture can exist, at 
least among "academic" classes, since it is the only class that 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 29 

is not "tracked" — that is, schoolboys, averages, and no-goods 
are all thrown in together. In English, reading, and math the 
schoolboys are all thrown together, the no-goods all together, 
under the pretense that . . . well, that's another subject, 
also nothing new. 

I'm jerked out of this reverie by a phone call. 

It's Jerry, the vice-principal at one of the other junior 
highs. (There are three, containing seventh and eighth 
graders; the district has twelve elementary schools. Well, one 
of the junior highs became a middle school a few years back, 
containing sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, perhaps just so 
the district could have a middle school when they came into 
fashion.) Jerry has a problem with the union. He has a job 
opening at his school, a teacher he wants to put in that job, 
and the teacher wants the job. Now he hears that the union 
won't let him do it. 

"What the hell's going on here?" he wants to know. 

Jerry and I are pretty good friends. He used to be the vice- 
principal at Spanish Main and worked hard and did a good 
job and also made out the football pool with a friend of his — 
in short, a good, smart guy. The principal at his school is re- 
tiring and he might get the job; we all hope so, although 
some among us believe that his very competency may dis- 
qualify him. 

Look, he tells me, I think Adele is the best person for the 
job, she's taken courses for it, signed up to take more courses 
this summer, I ought to be able to put her on and she ought 
to be able to get the job. What's wrong with that? 

I explain, not for the first time. It's the contract. It says, 
Jerry, that if there is a new position created by the board, 
then it has to be advertised, posted in all the schools, so peo- 
ple have the opportunity to apply. So then they apply, and 
then you interview them, and the best one gets the job. 
Simple. 

Jerry complains that it ends up just being a matter of se- 
niority, who gets the job, and that's what's wrong with it. I 



30 Prologue: The Fountain 

realize his problem — namely, that another teacher from the 
school wants the job too, and has more seniority than Adele. 

Not so, I say. Seniority only decides when the two candi- 
dates are equal in every other way. You get to do the inter- 
viewing and get to have your say, and by and large your say 
counts a lot, unless you do something really capricious. 

Capricious is a very useful word for the union. I remind 
Jerry that he brought all this trouble on himself. He told 
Adele she could have the job. She told everyone else; all this 
before any other teacher even knew there was such a job 
opening. Liz, the other teacher who wants the job, was prop- 
erly pissed off. She, unlike the other two, had read the con- 
tract, and called me in order to ask me why she ought to pay 
dues to a union that couldn't enforce its own contract. 

Naturally, I said that we could, and would. I explained it 
to Adele, who also pays dues (and wondered why the union 
didn't want her to have the job she wanted, was qualified for, 
etc.). I blamed it all on Jerry, as I now tell him. 

If you'll just follow procedures, you'll get good teachers, in 
the long run. I advise him to call Roy, the personnel director, 
and get Roy to post the damn job, and he says OK, he under- 
stands it and he will. 

I tell him. Look, Jerry, the reason we put stuff like that in 
the contract is that for years principals have abused the hir- 
ing of teachers, hired their sycophants whether they were best 
for the job or not, transferred people out of their school be- 
cause they didn't kiss ass, ran the school as though it was their 
own little country club, and that he, Jerry, ought to know 
that . . . 

Yeah, yeah, I get it, he said, but I still think Adele's best 
for the job because . . . 

OK, Jerry, I say, that's what you say after the interview, if 
you still think so. Meantime, call Roy. 

I get off the phone. Back in the teachers' room, people 
look at me inquiringly. Maybe I just heard something impor- 
tant, like who would be principal at Spanish Main next year. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 31 

Or, the board had laid off five administrative positions last 
week — maybe I'd heard who would get the ax; these same 
speculations also traditional on the last day, year after year. 

I told Peggy, ^vho is a friend of Adele's, what Jerry had 
said, and what I had said. I planned to call Liz later on. 
Peggy said it would still be a shame if Adele didn't get the 
job, since she was going to get her M.A. in computer literacy 
and was best for the job. I said Liz had taken courses too, and 
that anyway the point was we had to follow procedures and 
she said she understood that. You know, I said, it's probably 
OK if it's Jerry doing the choosing, since he's both compe- 
tent and fair, but what if it's . . . ? 

Everyone is listening; it's clear that we all understand that. 



The bus comes back from the high school. The kids are 
turned loose and the teachers come in. They are worn out, 
and show signs of great exasperation. How did it go? we ask 
them. 

It's the same old story. He stands up there lecturing the 
kids and telling them to quiet down — and listen to Him — 
and they don't quiet down and He keeps lecturing on — how 
in the world can He keep on talking when no one's listening? 
For God's sake! 

Every year, we all say, including those of us who have 
never been to graduation practice. How long has He been 
principal? Four? five? Seven years . . . ? 

Gary enters. 

I want everybody's attention! he says loudly. Unlike the 
kids, we pay attention. 

Gary teaches P.E. and math and supervises in the lunch- 
time cafeteria. He is chief among those of us who feel that 
there should be clear rules about transgressions, and that 
these rules should be carried out. They seldom are, of course. 
When he comes into the teachers' room, it is often to report 
some new outrage. We are always ready to hear it. 



32 Prologue: The Fountain 

I just want everyone to hear this from the horse's mouth, 
he says, before you hear it from anybody else! 

He tells his story. First of all, he was not pleased to be or- 
dered to go up to graduation practice. He wasn't in line to go 
up there; now, all of a sudden, it's an order. 

So, OK, Gary says. I'm sitting there reading my Time 
magazine. I don't have a group, I'm not responsible for any- 
thing there, have no duties, there is no reason for me to be 
there! So I'm reading Time. 

The next thing I know, there He is, bending over — get 
this, I mean He's bending down so His face is level with 
mine — and He shouts out. Stand up! 

Stand up? Well, I snap out of Time and look at Him, I 
mean, I'm astonished, I can't believe this man! and then I 
realize the band is practicing "The Star Spangled Banner" 
and He wants me to stand up for it. Without even thinking 
about it, I shout back, No! 

So what happened then? we all want to know. Well, He just 
kind of backed off and I continued to read Time, except now 
of course I wasn't reading it ... so nothing happened. But 
you'll all have to hear about it, I know, so I'm just telling you 
my version to begin with. 

The other point is, says Gary, I just don't get up, for either 
the flag or the song. I stopped doing that quite some time 
ago. Never mind why, but I did. Stopped. 

We all wait a bit for Him to come in, or do something. We 
can count on Him being really upset. We figure that since 
the kids wouldn't pay attention. He had to give some kind of 
order to a teacher, to show He was still the boss. Obviously 
that hadn't worked out. 

He ought to have had sense enough, at least, to pick some- 
one a little more docile, or someone who didn't give a damn. 
It was predictable, though, that He did not. Still, He didn't 
come in, and shortly after that most of us went out to lunch. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 33 

We're quite jolly at lunch. We can take as long as we like, 
a couple of hours at least; we are free. We have drinks, men- 
tion summer plans, make guesses about next year's principals, 
about what time will win today's pool, about what He will 
do about Gary. We agree He can't do a damn thing. We're 
not certain He kno^vs that. We wonder about money from 
the state for a raise in salary next year. 

In the end, we talk about those of us leaving this year. 
Two women have already left, in the middle of the year, 
their years of night-school courses in accounting and real 
estate having paid off. (That made Him angry too, we re- 
member, since it left a hole in His school and because they 
did not consult Him first about their futures.) Another 
teacher is leaving on account of disability. Joe is taking a 
leave of absence in order to study, officially, but we all figure 
he has another job, another kiiid of job, taking a leave just in 
case it doesn't work out. I'm going to work part-time next 
year. 

Harold is leaving. We all realize the school will not be the 
same without Harold. Someone brings up the fact that the 
two women who quit are making less money to start and 
working much longer hours and are happy as hell about it. 

At least here you're treated as an adult. Amy said, says a 
friend of Amy's. 

I think that Harold is my age, almost exactly, and has had 
it with schoolteaching. Still, I haven't been teaching for 
thirty-five years; yeah, only twenty-three, I tell myself. I re- 
mind myself to say, somewhere, that people shouldn't start 
in teaching school just out of college but ought to do some- 
thing else for a while, maybe for fifteen years. Otherwise, 
they never see anything but school and it assumes too much 
importance, as if it's the whole world. Now, if the school likes 
to be taken as a microcosm, a bush-league metaphor for the 
real world, that's fine with me, and it certainly does often 
seem as if that is what it is, but it is not the whole world . . . 



34 Prologue: The Fountain 

but Harold does stand for something like the old days, to be 
sure. He has his own system for teaching reading and English 
and social studies and it does not vary much, not because 
Harold is not creative or competent or whatever it currently 
is that teachers are not, but because he worked it out a long 
time ago and it suits his style and that's the way he does it. 
We get the idea from kids that he talks, they listen — listen to 
stories about growing up on the farm in North Dakota, the 
Germans, the Irish, who lived there, the nuns in school, the 
Indians, mixed in with stories about ancient Egypt and 
Marathon and Michelangelo — I realize that I don't know just 
how Harold's room works, because you don't just go into 
Harold's room to see what he's up to. Harold closes the door, 
and inside it's his own little universe. Microcosm. 

Actually, that's true of most of us. The thing is, Harold 
seems to us now as the last of the old-fashioned schoolteach- 
ers, dressing every day in a different suit and tie, a storyteller, 
a wit, and a moralist. We will not see his like in Spanish 
Main again. 

We talk some at lunch about the bad press we currently 
get. Our conclusion, in brief, is that if anyone thinks the 
trouble with public schools comes from incompetent teach- 
ers, they are crazy as hell. We figure that before you get 
around to the teachers, you'd better investigate the incom- 
petent administrators, the crazy parents, society, dope, stan- 
dardized testing, Sony Walkmans, the economy and the job 
market, ex-Governor Jerry Brown, TV, rock-and-roll, nuclear 
weapons, racism and sexism, and Vietnam, to name a few, not 
necessarily in that order. 

Incompetent teachers? I think. When haven't we been? Or, 
incompetent at what? There is no such thing as teaching 
school competently. 

Back at school, full of food and drink, both unaccustomed 
at this time of day, we wait. I try the librarian, but the li- 
brary door is locked; knocking gets no response. This check- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 35 

out still isn't settled and I feel even less like doing it than be- 
fore. I get back and the phone rings for me. It's Jerry again. 

He tells me that Roy says that he can't post the job because 
the board hasn't officially approved it yet, so there is no job, 
even though there is. Also, he says, even if they did approve 
it, they couldn't have interviews for it, since the principal has 
to be in on the interview and the board hasn't decided yet 
who will be the principal here and so . . . 

Right, I say. To myself I say. They'll do all this during the 
summer when no teachers are around and hope to do as they 
please. I advise Jerry to call Dave, the superintendent, and 
get him to get the board to approve the job anyway. Jerry re- 
minds me that Dave and some board members are at odds 
these days, so that probably won't do any good. 

Well, anyway, thanks, he says. I have some idea about 
what's going on, at least. 

I remind him that he hasn't got any computers anyway, to 
go with his new computer literacy course and teacher. The 
board approved the computers, but not the money for them, 
because some board members are mad at the computer com- 
pany over the maintenance bill. 

Hell, says Jerry. No way I'm going to worry about this any- 
more. I'm just going home and look at the ocean. Anyway, 
how do I know I'll even have this job next year? I might be 
right back in the classroom! Somebody will be, that's for 
damn sure! 

Right, Jerry, I say. Fate worse than death! 

All administrators, even the best ones, talk about "going 
back to the classroom" as something to be hated and feared. 
What the hell do they think we do? What do they think a 
school district is all about? The classroom, that's what it's all 
about! 

Well. I call Liz. She takes it surprisingly well. It's not life 
or death if I get the computer job, she says, although it 
would be nice to try something new. If I don't get it, I could 
take the science job at your school, now that Amy's gone. But 



36 Prologue: The Fountain 

I'm damn tired of being fucked over, excuse the language, 
and if there was one good thing I thought the union had 
done, it was to establish fair transfer procedures, and so when 
I heard this I got mad again — anyway, I'm glad everything is 
straightened out. That's all I ask. Keep up the good work! 

That pleased me enough so that when He came grimly up 
and said He wanted to see me in His office, I didn't mind. By 
God, we do have a good policy, and it makes life fairer and 
better! 

So what's up? I said. 

He was pacing, very red, more angry than I'd seen Him in 
some time. He told me that, by God, it was a damn shame He 
was going to have to reprimand some teacher on the last day, 
He didn't like to have unpleasantness the last day, but by 
God He was going to have to do it! He looked at me, to see 
if I knew what it was about. 

He's talking about Gary, I guess. I'm also aware that this 
same guy has done something unpleasant every last day since 
He's been here. He particularly likes to pick out some 
teacher and say, while handing out the check, I don't think 
I'll have a place for you next year! 

I can't let this go by, Jim! Here I spend the whole year 
trying to teach my students to respect the flag in my school 
and then one of My Teachers — look, what kind of model is 
that! I sign his check, dammit, and that just — well, it's be- 
traying me, that's what it is! 

I'm surprised at that. Teach the kids to stand up for the 
flag? When was that? We don't do the flag salute in school 
anymore, haven't for years. Not since Dave was principal here 
and ordered everyone to salute the flag in class, but then dis- 
covered we didn't have any flags, so bought flags and even 
came into my room to lead the salute, or to make sure I was 
doing it, it's hard to tell, but forgot how it went halfway 
through . . . 

Well, I say, it's your right to call him in, and his right to 
have me here as representative, but you know all that. You 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 37 

can call him in. But when you call him in, what are you 
going to do about it? 

I don't mention the fact that He doesn't pay Gary's salary, 
that the same guy signs Gary's check as signs His. It's an old 
sore point with the faculty. Why do you insist on saying you 
sign our checks? Bob asked him once in faculty meeting. 
Here's my check! waving it around in a fit of exasperation. Is 
this your signature? 

Well, I've got to do something. I won't be able to sleep this 
weekend if I don't do something! It's an insult! He tells me. 

OK, OK, I say, but I'm still asking you what are you going 
to do when you get him in here? 

I'm trying to be reasonable in my role of union rep, a kind 
of teacher shop steward. I'm remembering too that He has a 
right to tell Gary to go up to the High School during work- 
ing hours, if He wants, but if He didn't have anything for 
Gary to do there, we could argue that it was capricious. I also 
know that He is one of the few principals who has read the 
contract and abides by it, at least the letter, if not the spirit. 
Still, He's furious. Gary didn't obey. 

Look, I say. You know no one has to stand up for the flag 
if they don't want to. I see you didn't like it, but you know 
Gary is just going to tell you he doesn't stand up for the flag. 
What do you say then? It's going to be So you don't like it? 
So what? 

You won't like that either, I add. 

He paces some more, and tells me He'll let me know later. 
On the way out, I wonder what difference this will make to 
the check pool. I've got 2:46, which doesn't look too good 
now. 

I look for Gary, to tell him what happened. He's not to be 
found. I try the librarian again; no dice. When I get back to 
the teachers' room. He's just come in with his box of checks. 
He sits at a table, saying nothing, still looking grim. Someone 
checks the clock; three o'clock on the nose! Everyone moans 
except Bud, who goes over and collects the seventeen bucks. 



38 Prologue: The Fountain 

He looks startled; this won't help His weekend, I guess. But 
at least, or so it turns out, He has forgotten all about the 
ditto sheets to be signed, a first in living memory, and hands 
out the checks, mine included. 

Now I'm anxious to get out of there, in case He should re- 
member the sign-out sheets; also, I'm tired of this day. Peggy, 
however, wants to bring up the computer literacy course. We 
have sixteen computers which presently act just like work- 
books, printing out drills in math and reading. Many of us 
argue that especially with our students, meaning all our stu- 
dents who don't know much English (nor apparently much 
Spanish or Tagalog either), this is just what's needed. Short, 
intense bursts, three times a week, that's part of the reason 
our scores are up. (My scores, He says.) 

The district has a computer committee, she reminds me, 
which has already stated that computer literacy as a require- 
ment for all students is crazy! So why have the committee, if 
they're not going to pay any attention to it? 

We agree that "comp lit," as it's already being called, 
means no drills for the ESL and slower kids. It also means 
fewer students for the other electives: homemaking, shop, 
art, music, foreign language. 

I remind her that comp lit hasn't been approved by the 
board yet anyway. We make a plan to monitor board meet- 
ings and get teachers there to make speeches, should the sub- 
ject come up. That'll be in the summer, she reminds me, and 
no one will be around . . . and so . . . 

No. No more for now. You can see that, on this particular 
last day of school, just about every issue that is a part of 
schools and schoolteaching has been available for inspection. 
It is not that we or you, Readers, learn anything from it. 
There is nothing to learn here. Like my students and the 
fountain, we have all known it all along. This last day is no 
different than any other last day. 

But we'll point it out. If presidents and presidential can- 
didates are going to run for office on the basis that public 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 39 

schools are no good, and if they are going to suggest solutions 
to this surprising (and novel) problem, solutions ranging from 
more money to firing teachers who can't spell, from longer 
school hours and more homework to cutting out tenure (solu- 
tions, one must point out, neither surprising nor novel), 
then — then it ought to be pointed out, to everyone in this 
country who knows exactly what schools are and have always 
been, just what a school is. 

As for us? We make promises to get together over the sum- 
mer, and head for home. 



PART I 



A School Kit 



We were all down there at Mercer 
University in Macon, Georgia, lis- 
tening to some man tell us about 
the use of Behavior Modification in 
educating children in the classroom. 
Edgar Friedenberg had sat there, 
looking puzzled, for some time, but 
suddenly he brightened up, as if 
he'd just got the idea, and told the 
guy, "Oh! Now I understand! 
You're not talking about a child. 
You're talking about a child-kitl" 



CHAPTER 



1 



Discontent 



Gentle Reader, there have been schools in America for quite 
some time, and it has always been very difficult for everyone 
to be satisfied with them. 

Therefore, every once in a while a group of experts gets to- 
gether and makes rules for how the schools should behave.* 
Just so, in 1893 a Committee of Ten which included five col- 
lege presidents and whose chairman was Charles Eliot, presi- 
dent of Harvard University, issued a document which rec- 
ommended that all high school students, regardless of 
whether or not they intended to go to college, should receive 
a liberal education; they ought to study English, foreign lan- 
guages, mathematics, history, and science. 

Twenty-five years later, times had changed. Another com- 
mittee (for the Re-Organization of Secondary Education) had 
altogether different plans for the high schools. This com- 
mittee was chaired by the state supervisor of high schools in 

* Much of the historical information that follows I read most recently in The 
Troubled Crusade, by Diane Ravitch. Ravitch is, of course, not responsible 
for my argument. 

43 



44 Discontent 

Massachusetts and consisted of professors of education, higii 
school principals, and one college president who had been a 
professor of education. 

They issued a document called The Cardinal Principles of 
Secondary Education in 1918. These principles were to be 
(1) Health, (2) Command of "fundamental processes," (3) 
Worthy home membership, (4) Vocation, (5) Citizenship, (6) 
Worthy use of leisure, and (7) Ethical character. It is said 
that "fundamental processes" were left out of the original 
draft. 

I myself imagine that both groups quoted Thomas Jeffer- 
son to support their views, since that is what everyone in 
America ^vho has any views at all always ends up doing. In- 
deed, I'll do so myself: in 1786, Jefferson, in France, wrote 
a friend of his in Virginia, hoping that the state would pass 
a bill "for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No 
other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of 
freedom and happiness," he wrote, adding that he had seen the 
people of France remaining in the grip of "ignorance [and] 
superstition" which led directly to their oppression. "Preach, 
my dear sir," Jefferson wrote, "a crusade against ignorance. 
Establish and improve the law for educating the common 
people." 

So that's all there is to it, and should settle the matter. 

(Only a cynic would remember that the German who ad- 
vised the Prussian Junkers to grant free public schooling to 
the common people, somewhere aroimd that time, assured 
the Junkers that the schools would teach the kids — the future 
industrial workers — to be prompt and diligent, to get to 
work on time, not to have to go to the bathroom or "drink 
water" every five minutes, and that whatever else they 
learned, like reading, couldn't hurt because the same Junkers 
controlled what they read anyway. Indeed, around 1948 or 
so, when I was in college and read this kind of thing, an ar- 
ticle in Kenyon Review by an esteemed New Critic and poet, 
something of a hero of mine at the time, wrote about a liter- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 45 

acy movement in Egypt. He indicated that those Egyptians 
were going to be better off remaining illiterate, since all they 
would be able to read was Farouk's newspaper which was full 
of lies that they would believe, since they would believe, as 
converts do, anything in print. In their illiterate state, the 
critic thought, they believed nothing and were better off.) 

Well, we can recognize the above two dissenting opinions 
as cavils; they are out of the mainstream and neither could 
quote Jefferson. Everyone else, from Charles Eliot to John 
Dewey to Ichabod Crane, would agree with Jefferson. 

Ah, Readers, that has not seemed to settle the matter. 

Still, one must admit that the crusade against ignorance 
goes on. We all agree with it, we support it, pay taxes for it, 
talk to our children about it, want the best out of it, and in- 
deed work sometimes within some of the institutions created 
to wage the crusade. We would not dream of saying, "Well, 
to hell with it!" 

But since everyone (in the mainstream, on the right path, 
in their right minds, all good citizens) believes in the cru- 
sade, it is reasonable to wonder about the source of the dis- 
content about it. We have, after all, plenty of public 
schools — certainly more, and in better shape, than old Jeffer- 
son had or maybe even dreamed about; more, perhaps, than 
he even wanted. 

There is no shortage of common people to go to them, 
either. 

The schools have taken on every problem, every task, every 
reform at the heart of the matter of American civilization — 
from literacy to child labor to segregation to Vietnam to dope 
to sex and, if the schools' scores are low on these matters, no 
other institutions in the country even showed up for the test. 
Compulsory education has been legislated, at first in order 
to make the poor parents let their kids out of the fields or the 
shop to go to school so that they should not be ignorant and in 
danger of being oppressed. We did this by quoting Jefferson. 



46 Discontent 

Later, the law was used to make the kids themselves go to 
school instead of going out to work where they might make 
some money. Some people have called this oppression, al- 
though they may find it more difficult to find an appropriate 
statement to quote. 

Given all that, we still have to deal with the fact that if 
Mr. Reagan and if most governors and if most politicians ran 
for office on the ground of discontent with the crusade, then 
there must be some discontent. 

And if there appeared a National Committee for Excel- 
lence to make plans (once again!) for how the schools should 
behave, and if another National Institute (in this case, Car- 
negie) came out shortly afterward Avith another plan, equally 
prestigious, but totally different — then it must, be that Amer- 
icans are discontented with the schools. 

Who is? 

And what are they discontented about? 

Well, certainly, all teachers are discontented. They have 
always been, quite rightly. Believe it or not, the main discon- 
tent of teachers is not about their pay. It's in there, of course, 
but that is true of everybody, so it doesn't count. 

Are school administrators discontented? I think not. They 
have become management — upper management for the su- 
perintendent and assistant superintendent for curriculum 
and the assistant superintendent for business, let's say; and 
middle management for the horde of supervisors and for the 
principals. They have irritations, of course, but these are part 
of the ball game, and in the main they say, in chorus. Let's 
make the system work! Besides, nothing bad which happens 
at school really affects them; it may affect management's 
image, but that's not the same. Given that there are excep- 
tions, it is not usually the bent of management to change the 
workshop. If it ain't producing, they have no trouble finding 
fault. That they are one of the main sources of discontent 
among teachers is obvious. Well, management is discontented 
about its pay, of course. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 47 

Parents? Well, clearly, some parents take their children out 
of the crusade in order to send them to parochial schools or 
private schools, or to no school at all. Those who do that, 
however, cannot be numbered in the ranks of the discon- 
tented. In fact, they are fairly content. Their circumstances, 
or their philosophies, have enabled them to avoid discontent. 
Even so, their reasons for taking their options against the 
crusade rarely have to do with leaiming, if we are to take edu- 
cation as having to do with learning. The reasons have more 
to do with violence, racism (often the same thing), discipline, 
and advantage. But the common people? The common par- 
ents? They clearly have worries. Worries are not the same as 
discontents. Should the public school teacher like their child 
and say the kid is doing OK, then they do not have to worry. 
The teachers are common people too, and so everyone under- 
stands each other — the kid will do OK in the country of 
America, will not remain in the grip of ignorance and super- 
stition, and will not be oppressed either. Of course, should 
the kid not be doing OK, then the teacher has got to say. 
Look, the kid is not doing the work, talks too much, social- 
izes too much, and must straighten up. The teacher and the 
parent agree that the kid must shape up. Often the kid 
doesn't; the result is worry. 

We all agree with Jefferson. I have friends who all said to 
their kids, as little kids. Go to school, be on time, be neat and 
clean, and don't smart off. That is the common people's ad- 
vice, and it should suffice, and does suffice, until the common 
kids decide to quit the business. 

Kids? Well, the kids in school, just like the teachers in the 
school, are dissatisfied. If this joint would just do this, or that, 
or the other thing, or if they just wouldn't do this, or that, or 
the other thing, we'd be happy, they say. They say this every 
day. We say it too. It is true that the kids who are the most 
unhappy with the school, and who make the teachers most 
unhappy (and who cause the administrators to say. Let's make 
the system work!) never miss a day of the crusade. 



48 Discontent 

The above four are the main ingredients of the crusade, 
and none of them are discontented, in the way that Mr. 
Reagan, and so on, are talking about. 

Dissatisfaction, of course. Disappointment, OK. Worry, 
right. We have changed the terms here. 

I imagine that my first-grade teacher, Ms. Cain, was dis- 
satisfied with me. Well, I was dissatisfied with her too. I imag- 
ined that she said, indeed I had evidence that she said, Jimmy 
is a smart enough kid, if he'd only shut up once in a while 
and listen to me! I thought, at the time, if ol' Ms. Cain would 
just shut up a while and stop calling up my mother and tell- 
ing her that . . . 

It is not new. Nothing about it is new. What seems to 
happen is that there comes a day when everyone decides, once 
again, that everyone is discontented with American public 
schools. How that decision is made is a mystery, but every 
once in a while, it is made. Usually such a decision is accom- 
panied by "test scores," which are, naturally, down. Every 
respectable newspaper and journal then drags out an article, 
reprinted every ten years or so, about a teacher or two who 
can't spell. A mother or two will be found who will claim 
that her child, recently graduated from high school, cannot 
read. Captains of industry are quoted to the effect that if we 
just had a well-educated work force, we wouldn't be in the 
economic fix we're in. Investigators are sent out to report on 
the Japanese school system, since it seems to result in selling 
lots of automobiles, thus must have provided a well-educated 
work force. 

The question was. Who is discontented? All of a sudden 
the answer is: everyone in America is discontented. 



CHAPTER 



So, of Course, Finally, I Did Turn the 
Water Fountain On 



What is most extraordinary about youth today 
is that adults everywhere should be so worried 
about it. 

— E DGAR FrIEDENBERG 



I do think that it is junior high school students, twelve- and 
thirteen-year-olds, who qualify as being "youth." I once taught 
second graders in summer school, and it was clear that they 
were not "youth." I once taught high-schoolers up in the 
mountains, and they were not quite "youth" either. I have, 
at various times and in various places, taught graduate stu- 
dents in universities, and they certainly were not youth. 

So, one day after school, I went and got the wrench again 
and turned on the water. Of course, it was still plugged up. 
Still, Alex Rashed, an Arab kid who, born in the Argentine, 
considered himself to be a cholo, had just recently probed at 



49 



50 So, of Course, Finally I Did Turn the Water Fountain On 

it and guaranteed he would fix it, and he did; it didn't squirt 
out fifteen feet anymore. What the fountain did was to emit, 
grudgingly, a tiny trickle. The crayon scrapings were still 
there, but had been rearranged by Alex. 

You turned the water on! said the very first youth in my 
first-period class. All entering students rushed to test it out; 
no one took anyone else's word for it. Shortly, of course, it 
was All Heart, Mr. Herndon! You turned it back on, but it 
don't work! 

It does work, I say. 

I have them there. It works. It don't work too good! they 
point out. I don't care. What / point out is that's it for all 
this going out into the halls to get a drink! Fini, c'est tout! 
I'm fond of saying. 

By second period, here come Mark, Juliette, and Melinda, 
joined by Sarah, another Indian by way of Fiji, and Annie, 
a Samoan girl, smarter and bigger than everyone. Freed from 
work the last days, they are dying to confront me, on their 
ways to finding out the adult secrets of the universe. Finally! 
you can see them thinking. Annie and Sarah have been out 
of class the past two days for band practice. They have already 
been filled in about the water. 

We go over it. You have to see that, going over it, we are 
all again as happy as larks. This is precisely what we are here 
for — they as youths, me as adult/ teacher. 

Now, I say, let's go back to the beginning. Somebody put 
crayons in the fountain, right? 

Andy! they cry. 

Fuck Andy! I say. I don't actually say that. Forget Andy is 
probably what I say. 

I am in command now. They await my speech. How could 
I possibly say, Forget Andy? is what they want to know. Their 
whole upbringing, thus far, has told them about Andy and 
his fate, about Andy being identified and punished and they 
being scot-free to enjoy the fountain squirting all over the 
place. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 51 

While this is going on, Andy and his troops are getting 
the room cleaned out and put away, the end-of-school work- 
ers are working away, and there is continual demand for 
Sarah, Mark, Annie, et al. to be good guys and supply answers. 

Now when, I say, when the fountain squirted out, what did 
you all think? 

No one wants to talk about that. Bright, as all youths are, 
they can see the discussion is heading the wrong way. Youths 
are brave in their minds, but rarely Avhen it comes down to it. 

Annie is brave all the time, no doubt because she is a 
Samoan youth. We liked it! she says. You know we did! That's 
why you asked. She can see right through me, she implies. 
That was the most fun we ever had in this boring class! 

The last will take care of me; it is all my fault, for having 
a boring class. 

Everyone agrees loudly. Exactly, says Juliette seeing as how 
Annie said it and is still alive; if your class wasn't so boring, 
no one would have to put crayons in the water faucet! 

Fountain, I say. Go on . . . 

Mark says, Why do you insist on calling the Avater faucet 
a fountain? A fountain is something entirely different . . . 
and he goes on to describe fountains he has seen in this or 
that shopping mall. 

I'm a little taken aback by this, because I don't know why 
I insist on it. So I give in and say that when I was a kid, 
that's what we called 'em. Building up courage, I'm about to 
say, after all, we didn't have these plastic shopping malls 
[plastic Avill get them!) . . . but then I am immediately met 
with a barrage of questions to the effect of How old are you? 
and various remarks about the Fall of Rome and the Civil 
War. You mean back when they were building the pyramids? 

But they already know exactly how old I am, the result of 
such encounters earlier on, so I win. OK, I get to say, you all 
loved it when it squirted out fifteen feet. Point is, why did 
you all keep on squirting it out, after it was clear that it 
would squirt out fifteen feet? 



52 So, of Course, Finally I Did Turn the Water Fountain On 

They fall back. We didn't squirt it! Didn't do any of the 
above. It was true. They didn't have to. 

You didn't have to, I remind them, but you liked it! I rush 
on. In a civilized world, people would see that the fountain 
squirted out fifteen feet and got everyone wet and their 
homework wet and caused a panic and was therefore no good. 
No good! Wait, stick around. Don't move . . . for they show 
every sign of having something important to do elsewhere. 
It's my turn. 

And so, being civilized, no one would turn it on, or if 
someone did, you civilized people would tell them to stop it! 
Of course. No civilized person would take pleasure in that 
squirting out! Right? Of course! 

So, I say, you are all barbarians! Being that the class is 
called social studies, it is a word I get to use and I am fond 
of it. Learning, reinforcement. Barbarians! Fini, I say, c'est 
tout! 

Melinda interrupts this lecture by exclaiming over the grade 
book. Students check this book every day. They check it in 
order to see if I put down their own marks and also to see if 
I put down marks for anyone else who didn't deserve it. I am 
capable, they know, of anything. The book remains mysteri- 
ous, with its little symbols and squiggles and runes, the 
meaning of which they can never be quite certain of, al- 
though I am happy to explain it every day, except that it is 
about life and death. That's why Juliette et al. are up here, 
trying to understand. Youth, however, is not going to under- 
stand me. 

How can you be giving Andy a B minus? asks Melinda, out- 
raged. She has caught me doing something not just unclear, 
but wrong. 

I privately note that "how can you be giving" construc- 
tion. The "I be, you be, he, she, it be" declension of black 
kids has caught on. It has become a standard. If Melinda uses 
it, everyone uses it. 

They all crowd over the book to see, as they've seen before. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 53 

that Andy has done no — not one — weekly assignment this 
quarter. So how can he be getting a B minus? It is hard to tell 
if they are triumphant or disappointed at having caught me 
out in some kind of . . . unfairness, is probably it. 

What do you care what Andy gets? I ask sternly. You are 
all much too nosey anyway. I'm giving out the grades here. 

In truth, they have nothing against Andy. Like everyone 
else, they like and admire Andy. They can't associate with 
him too much, because of his hard-line stance. Anyway, their 
concern is the fairness of the world, the primary youthful 
concern. 

I point to Andy's grades on the tests. Two tests — one a 
pretty simple vocabulary test, the other a rather difficult map 
test. Andy got 100 percent on both. So he gets a B minus, I say. 

But he didn't do any work at all! they cry. 

Why are we here? I ask. To work, or to know something? 

Both, says Annie, quite correctly. They are temporarily 
satisfied. They, after all, are getting A's both for working and 
for knowing something, plus this free gift of time at the end 
of the year. Mark has seen all this coming and is sabotaging 
the stapler, by turning the little platform around so that the 
staples come out backward. He does this almost every day. 

Mark! I yell. Don't be sabotaging the stapler! I've also ac- 
cepted "be" as a standard. Unlike "faucet" and "drink water," 
I like it, especially in conjunction with "don't." 

I'm not quite finished with them. I know they suspect that 
Andy be cheating on the tests. I don't want them to have 
anything to hold on to. I call up Andy. 

We go over to the big map, six feet by four or so, quite 
nicely drawn freehand and colorfully painted by some stu- 
dents in the first three or four weeks of school. It is there to 
study geography from, and displays the principal mountains 
and rivers and cities, etc., of Europe and the Middle East. 
None of them are labeled. 

OK, Andy, I say, what's this river? I point to it. 

Melinda and the rest watch carefully. They know it all. 



54 So, of Course, Finally I Did Turn the Water Fountain On 

Euphrates, says Andy, careful to betray no interest. 

These mountains? 

Carpathians. 

This volcano? 

Vesuvius. 

This sea? 

Adriatic. Can I go finish the books now? 

Wait. This river? 

Danube. 

Thus endeth the lesson. The moral I've pointed out is, 
however, unacceptable. Andy is a ne'er-do-well, causes 
trouble, gets kicked out of class, sent to the vice-principal, 
does no classwork, and must therefore be dumb. That makes 
sense. But he isn't dumb. They go off, looking for a way out. 
They are youths and have no use for the real, just as we have 
taught them. I am little better off than they, and for the 
same reason. Of course, I'm grown up and accept the real, 
but I'm not supposed to around here. After all, in my role — 
hell, in my job, roles are not in my vision! — Andy is a pain 
in the ass. He is smart as hell and won't do anything. Thus he 
aggravates me, since it is somehow part of my job to get him 
to do something, indeed, do my assignments in the form of 
classwork. Well, "won't do anything" ... he does plenty, 
all of it sneaky and disruptive. That shows considerable zeal, 
since it is not so easy to disrupt my class. I mean, you can 
disrupt some classes easily and innocently just by whispering, 
not paying attention, chewing gum, standing up, not open- 
ing your book, forgetting your pencil. We teachers aren't the 
same. 

Note that all during this time, I (who have taught here 
more than twenty years and am quite secure in my job, as 
they say) — I keep in mind what is officially going on here, in 
case I have to tell someone who might ask. What is going on 
is a Final Review Lesson, Make-Up Work for those who have 
missed important assignments. Inventory and Storage of texts 
and other books by students (in itself a valuable lesson) while 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 55 

some students, A students the year long, alternately discuss 
issues with me or help these striving students whom you can 
see now, working away. I too am in business, and scot-free. 

The question here is, whom are all these adults who worry 
about youth worried about? 

Are they worried about Melinda and Mark and Juliette and 
Annie and Sarah and their perception of the real? 

Are they worried about Andy and terrorism? 

Are they worried about the panicking "extra-credit" work- 
ers, who are trying to get in a little overtime because the rent 
is due and report cards are coming out and they lost last 
week's paycheck drinking and playing liar's dice at the Lone 
Star Bar? 

Frankly, it sounds to me as if these worriers are only peo- 
ple who went to school themselves a while back, ten or twelve 
or one hundred years ago, and have forgotten entirely what it 
was like, and so have made up a whole, new, imaginary school 
system to worry about. 

From what I can get from the various media, now, in the 
summer of 1984, what they all are worried about is me! Me, 
and Harold and Peggy and Maggie and Gary and Clementine 
and Bob and Joe and Jane and the rest of us! 

This national worry doesn't seem to be about Juliette et al., 
or Andy, or the late workers. (We, Harold and I and all, we 
worry about them.) 

They don't seem to be worrying about Dave or Him or the 
school board. They worry some about the union. 

These introductory pages are only here to remind you, 
readers, what a school is, and what it is for, and why it is 
there, and what goes on in it. It is only something to remem- 
ber: there is nothing to learn. 



CHAPTER 



3 



The Pendulum 

What I then saw confounded and amazed me. 
The sweep of the pendulum had increased in 
extent by nearly a yard. As a natural conse- 
quence, its velocity was also much greater. 

— POE 



No one is going to admit that the crusade itself is no good. 
Jefferson lives. 

Right now, however, now that we are all official discon- 
tented citizens, discontented with our public schools, what do 
we propose to do about them? How do we plan to correct 
them? In what direction shall we proceed in order to raise 
test scores, sell more cars, elect people running for public 
office? 

We need to look at the pendulum in order to see what we 
ought to do. Please note, first, the time line. 

The recommendations of Charles Eliot in 1893 have already 



56 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 57 

been mentioned, and the fact that, twenty-five years later, the 
pendulum swung back the other way. 

By 1957 it was, on account of Sputnik, in full swing the 
other way. But by 1967, back it went again. It had taken only 
ten years to complete its cycle. 

And now? It's 1985. The Committee on Excellence's report 
recommended more science, more math, more "time on task," 
more homework, and more discipline, firing teachers, more 
attention to technology (and technology was the same word 
used by Eliot in 1893). It was followed in only six months by 
the Carnegie report which said, No, no more math or science, 
instead more reading, more writing, no more home^vork, for- 
get "time on task," think, make teachers' jobs more bearable, 
and the kids should do public service. 

But if the pendulum is going to swing back now every six 
months, we are going to be in a situation more like poetry or 
revolution than ordinary citizens' discontent. We will be like 
Poe. 

That awful sweep! That terrible velocity! 

What, in God's name! shall we do? What are the ends, the 
poles, of this demonic swing? 

Hold it, citizens! Before we collapse into terror and do 
something we wouldn't otherwise dream of doing, let's re- 
member that we have been to school and therefore are not in 
the grasp of ignorance or superstition. We'll examine the 
pendulum, as Poe did, and get out of this. 

At the poles of the pendulum are words, written as if on 
dungeon walls, luminous, perhaps, so that the captive may 
never overlook them. On one end the words will be, oh, 
achievement, the intellect, effort, authority, the future. On 
the other, socialization, democracy, the senses, freedom, the 
present. The captive sees the pendulum at one pole, hover- 
ing, and reads the luminous words and thinks. Right! Now it 
will stop! The pendulum has already begun its return swing. 



58 The Pendulum 

The captive, mesmerized, awaits the momentary rest at the 
other end, then reads again and is, for a split second, sure 
that the ordeal is over. 

In Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann has the Devil describe 
Hell as consisting of two vast rooms, one hot enough to melt 
granite, and the other of a most intolerable cold, between 
which the inhabitants rush continually, for as soon as they are 
in the one, the other seems to be a heavenly bower. A wonder- 
ful description, one to excite the senses quite a bit and, if a 
bit harsher in consequence, quite in line with our pendulum. 
Back and forth; as soon as we are in one place, we must head, 
shrieking, for the other. 

We have been to school and are not in the grip of super- 
stition. We know that there is no Hell. That ought to tell us 
something about the pendulum. 

Going back a bit, we know that neither pole is a heavenly 
bower. Even the Devil knows that. We have been to school 
and are not in the grip of ignorance either. Therefore, we 
know that there came an era known as Sputnik wherein it 
was clear that schools were not paying enough attention to 
math, discipline, homework, authority, and the future, and 
besides, the bloody Russians had this spacecraft up there. We 
blamed this on Progressive Education and freedom, and so 
on, and set about to remedy the situation. Ten years later, 
the luminous words told us that that hadn't worked, and all 
the students were dropping out and bored. Certainly, we had 
plenty of spacecraft. We invented "open" and "alternative" 
and "counterculture" and remedied that situation. Presently 
the razor-edged blade zooms past us, whispering, The schools 
are failing! Ah! We are confounded, and amazed. 

We are now supposed to be in another Sputnik era. We'll 
remedy the thoughtlessness of the last Progressive era. But the 
very reason for the supposed Progressive era, like the reason 
for all such eras, is that the preceding Sputnik era didn't 
work, was itself no heavenly bower. 

At the opposite ends of the swing are written, in small 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 59 

print, the very same words. The pendulum swings from No 
Good to No Good, or from Not So Bad to Not So Bad, or 
from OK to OK. The same words appear at each end. 

No matter which way the pendulum was said to swing, to- 
ward which pole, there was never any change. One reason is 
that no schools really ever changed in the slightest. Whatever 
it was, no one did it anyway. 

That is exactly the same as saying that there is no pendu- 
lum at all. 



CHAPTER 



4 



Raffia 



When I was in the fourth grade in Santa Barbara, our class 
went on a field trip. We went after lunch so that we could all 
eat lunch in the cafeteria, a lunch free not only to the poor, 
but to everyone. Maybe we were all poor in town, since this 
would have been 1935 or so. 

Of course, we had been on field trips before. We had been 
to the roundhouse to see the trains switch and ridden in the 
cab of the locomotive. We had been to the Mission and to the 
natural history museum attached to it. We had been to the 
Courthouse. We had been to the Bird Sanctuary. 

These were, however, educational field trips, from which 
we had to return to answer questions or write "essays" about 
what we had seen or heard. Even then, the school imagined 
that if we were not taken to these places, we would never 
know anything about them, although in fact we played daily 
on the grassy fields around the courthouse, wandered its tile- 
floored corridors and peeped into its offices; we hung around 

60 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 61 

the trains, making plans to run away on these trains someday 
(and saw men dropping off those trains who obviously were 
running away), we played around the Mission, we ^vent down 
to the lake bird sanctuary and threw rocks at the birds . . . 

We never went on a field trip to the WPA building where 
I, for one, accompanied my father every morning before go- 
ing on to school. We drove down in his '29 Chevy, bought 
while he was still working and driven out here from Texas, 
and he went into his little office, and I hung around the court- 
yard to watch the men climb into the backs of pickup trucks 
carrying picks and shovels to go to work somewhere, and 
then I walked back and up the hill to school. 

One place they went to work, I remember, was our own 
school, where they blacktopped an area which had been 
formerly just a dusty, weed-strewn lot, so that we could have 
a better place to play baseball and football. It seemed to take 
them a long time. Still, I don't really know if it did or not; 
the message was in the air, all that time, about how the WPA 
workers didn't exactly work all that hard. I went with my 
father every day to the WPA courtyard and watched the men 
and talked to them and wanted, one day when I grew up, to 
be allowed to climb into those pickups myself and go to work. 
I was quite capable, at the same time, of collaborating in the 
hoots and taunts directed at the same WPA men, at our 
school, and to believe that they were lazy and worthless. 

Thus: the WPA men were different beings at the court- 
yard and at the school. A good lesson, had there been anyone 
around to give it. The blacktopped field may have been 
better for baseball and football, although certainly, when you 
fell down your elbow or knee got more severely scraped. At 
the same time, lizards and horned toads, which could formerly 
be found in that dusty field and taken into classrooms, were 
missing. 

This field trip. Now it became clear to us (and God knows 
how many times the teacher had to tell us and explain it to 
us before it became clear!) that we were just going to go 



62 Raffia 

down to this little creek, near the beach. We were going to 
walk down there from school, spend the afternoon there, and 
then we could all just walk home. We all went to this creek 
all the time to try to catch crawdads and frogs and knew every 
inch of it. Still, innocents (not quite youths), Ave bragged to 
the rest of the school; while they were in school, we were just 
going down to the creek! 

I still remember all about it. It was perhaps the highlight 
of my entire schooling. We did go. It was the same creek. We 
may have thought that the presence of the teacher and the 
school and us, students^ of necessity, on a field trip, might 
have changed that creek into something that you could write 
an essay about. Perhaps the creek would suddenly have had 
Hoover Dam built across it! You could damn sure write an 
essay about that! (I recall we studied Hoover Dam quite a 
bit anyway.) 

When we got there, the creek had not changed. It was the 
very same creek to which we went of our own free will. 

That day, it gradually became clear to us that what we 
were to do at the creek was to gather willow branches. Well, 
there were plenty of them, and it looked as though we were 
being given a mandate to tear up the willow trees, rip off 
branches and leaves and throw them, fall into the creek, and 
have a hell of a time. Later on we were told the day was over 
and we left the creek and went home. We were tired by then 
anyway, played out and hungry. 

The next day, however, we did the very same thing. We ate 
the school's lunch and trooped down to the creek. It is true 
that, beforehand, we had been informed that since we were 
studying California Indians, we were gathering these willows 
in order to make an Indian house — ^just as the Indians did, 
earlier on, and from the very same creek. I am not sure if I 
even knew, up until then, that we were studying Indians, al- 
though you may be sure that I was a model scholar. I guess it 
did not matter to me very much what it was we were study- 
ing. Anyway, as it turned out, we had not gathered enough 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 63 

of the right kind of willow branches, not really being Indians, 
and were going to get more. 

When we got there, there was a man waiting, standing 
alongside a pickup truck. It was a '33 Ford, which was a 
pretty new car for us, and we admired it and got in it and 
crawled over it, until told it was time to go get the willows. 
Mrs. Smith (I'm almost sure that was her name — in any case 
I know I had a Mrs. Smith or a Miss Smith sometime around 
there) deferred to the man, let him order us around, tell us 
and point out what kind of branches to get — and, in the end, 
he got most of them himself, cutting them off neatly with a 
jackknife he pulled out of his pocket. Then we all piled all 
the suitable limbs in the back of his truck and he drove off. 

It was a pretty satisfactory day too, and we were not sur- 
prised to see those willows, neatly trimmed of leaves and 
twigs, in our classroom the next morning. We were not sur- 
prised either, to hear that we were going to build an Indian 
house, right there in a corner of our room. 

What we didn't know was that we were in the grip of a 
great revolution in American Public Education. 

I know no^v that the progressive movement had us in thrall. 

The professors at Columbia University had their eye on us 
and Ms. Smith knew it. She also knew that our parents might 
be a little surprised at us coming back from school all wet 
and dirty and happy from the creek, which was why she had 
lectured us firmly on what we were doing. She hoped, of 
course, that when we got home and were questioned, that 
we'd say. We're studying California Indians! But also, if we 
somehow didn't say that — and Ms. Smith, if a Progressive, 
showed us no sign at all of being crazy — she would have an 
ace in the hole to tell the principal when the parents called. 

Learning by Doing! Ms. Smith would tell the principal, 
and all the principals and superintendents and school boards 
of America would have to stick by her, else John Dewey 
would have to have a word with them. 



64 Raffia 

After our days at the creek, I would have given my full 
support to the progressive movement, had I ever heard of it, 
but that was about all the Learning by Doing we experienced 
that year. We had the willows which, green and limber at 
first, soon dried out and became hard to handle, and we had 
heaps of raffia which, now that I look back, was one of the 
main ingredients of the progressive movement, as if Colum- 
bia University had a corner on the raffia market. We were 
supposed to just bend the branches and tie them together 
with raffia, making a kind of dome, but it wasn't easy; noth- 
ing worked right and when it couldn't be done in fifteen 
minutes we lost interest in it. If my teaching experience holds 
true, we probably told Ms. Smith that this was boring, and 
asked. How come we never learn nothing in here? 

Ms. Smith persevered though, and the man showed up 
again and got it built, probably helped by a smart, progres- 
sive kid like old Andy. We sat in the Indian house once in a 
while, I recall, and no doubt it was the subject of some admi- 
ration on Parents' Night. 

Learning by Doing did not take over the rest of our curric- 
ulum nor our school hours, unless you count as Doing our 
rote memorization and drill of multiplication tables, our writ- 
ing of spelling words twenty times each, our answering of 
questions about everything we read, our taking home and 
Doing, or Not-Doing, homework. That was certainly not 
what Columbia University had in mind by Doing. As for 
Ms. Smith, I imagine that she was happy to have done her 
part for the movement and to be able to forget about it for 
the year. For, although my happy memory of those afternoons 
at the creek is one thing, I know that Ms. Smith had to put 
up with plenty of kids Avho spent the day crying because they 
fell in the creek or because someone threw mud on them, 
having to go to the bathroom, feeling sick, being too hot (or 
too cold), having to call their mothers, and being too tired to 
walk home. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 65 

In short, although the movement, a great national move- 
ment, was of vast importance, involving the praise or jeers of 
newspapers, radio pundits, politicians of every sort — you can 
find and read the annals of the progressive movement, the re- 
search, the clear and right declarations of need and intent to 
change — and although the movement was not tainted by in- 
volvement in voter registration or Vietnam protests or dope 
(as the school-movement in the sixties was), but instead was 
led by the most respectable people in the country — psycholo- 
gists, scientists, philosophers — our school stolidly refused to 
change. A movement to change education in this country, it 
did not have anything to do with schools. 

I'm sure there must have been official progressive schools, 
just as, later on, there were official alternative schools, but 
they were not schools. None of us common kids in the fourth 
grade had ever heard of one, nor heard of any kid who went 
to one. I believe my mother, who was certainly a progressive 
in many ways (my diet, for one thing, changing from goat's 
milk one year to orange juice with increasing drops of iodine 
in it the next, to orange juice with a raw egg in it the next), 
would have had the same attitude toward them as she did 
toward private schools, which was that they were places where 
people could send stupid rich kids who couldn't make it in 
the schools. 

I do not mean to ridicule the progressive movement. Quite 
the contrary. When I took courses for my teaching credential 
one summer, they were all based on the tenets of Progressiv- 
ism and I thought them quite sound, and still do, if you can 
leave out the belief in testing. But in our fourth grade, after 
the tasks listed above, we had lunch recess, where we saw 
that neither marbles nor real estate could be played on that 
blacktop, and, in the afternoons, a lady would come in to 
give us music ... I remember, right now, the absolute thrill 
of hearing her sing harmony to "Home on the Range," the 
first time I ever got the idea of it. If she didn't come, Ms. 



66 Raffia 

Smith gave us Art, and we had a band which you could go 
to if you agreed to "take up" an instrument. All these last 
items were quite amenable to Learning by Doing, perhaps 
because in order to learn them at all you had to be allowed 
to sing out loud, put on paint, and make noise on your horn. 

We sometimes had P.E. with a teacher, before being turned 
loose to play dodgeball, which wasn't P.E. That is exactly 
what fourth graders do now. I bet thousands of fourth grad- 
ers study California Indians (in California) right now; cer- 
tainly the structure of their day is exactly the same as it was 
in 1935. 

Actually, the only difference I can point to between my 
own fourth-grade school and elementary schools today is the 
free lunch. We were served Spanish Rice and Creamed 
Chipped Beef (also on rice), both of which I was very fond of 
and wished my mother would cook for dinner. 

The lunch was free, as I've said, to everyone. We all just 
went in and got lunch and ate lunch. We have free lunch 
these days too, but only for those who will stand up and de- 
clare that they are too poor to afford to buy lunch. In order 
to do this, they must fill oiu forms proving they are too 
poor — there is a sliding scale, so much income, so many kids 
in the family. If you can't qualify for free lunch, you may in- 
deed qualify for reduced lunch, admittedly an innovation. 
These free-lunch kids get their notices — you passed, you 
didn't pass — right in my classroom, brought in by a student 
messenger, where every kid snoops at every message which 
comes in. It is wonderful. You may imagine that there will be 
some friendly jesting back and forth between those kids who 
can pay and those who can't, and even that teachers may have 
to deal with this right after lunch. 

We didn't even call it "free lunch," but only lunch. So the 
schools have actually gone downhill, in the progressive sense, 
since 1935. I doubt this lunch was the result of a demand by 
Columbia University; more likely an offshoot of some social- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 67 

istic program in the Roosevelt administration. But lunch, 
hopefully Spanish Rice, served to all without charge, just as 
a matter of fact, will be my first demand in any movement to 
restore the schools to the enlightened place they occupied in 
1935. Start there, comrades, and work up. 



CHAPTER 



5 



Plans 



Happily, I'm supplied by a benevolent union with material 
describing all the plans in various states for improving" the 
public schools, which are in disarray. Within this cornucopia, 
no pendulum, real or imaginary, is swinging. The plans, 
whether they have become law or are only suggestions, 
whether already funded by the state or not, whether from 
California or Tennessee, are remarkably the same. 

We are going to have tougher educational standards! We 
are going to have excellence! That is that. 

Specifically, students in high schools will now take at least 
three (sometimes four) years of English, at least three (some- 
times four) years of math, at least three years of science, at 
least one year (sometimes more) of foreign language and, in 
most instances, one-half year of computer literacy, or, at 
Spanish Main, comp lit. 

Variations occur only in details — that is, some plans spell 



68 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 69 

out one year of American literature, for example, in the three 
or four years of English. Some will require algebra for every- 
one among the three or four years of Math. Some insist on 
biology within the science program. Some say Spanish, spe- 
cifically. The majority leave out such details, figuring that 
English is English, science is science, foreign language is 
foreign language, math, math, and that's good enough for 
them. 

One such plan proposes to allow "tracking" in these re- 
quired subjects; one refuses to allow tracking. All the rest 
leave that subject, once a major controversy, out. 

Obviously, the requirements for graduation are to be in- 
creased to the extent just listed. (We are not going to have 
anyone graduating from high school claiming he or she can't 
read!) Moreover, competency tests must be passed, in most 
plans, at the end of junior high school, for a student to even 
get into high school. Graduating from the stage at Spanish 
Main may be in jeopardy. 

Students must and will do Much More Homework, state 
these plans. No plan, if it hopes to be funded by any legisla- 
ture, dares to leave out homework. 

All plans demand more Time On Task — a popular catch- 
phrase of the last three — four? five? — years, which apparently 
means spending more time on schoolwork in the classroom. 
Most plans see that more time on task can be achieved most 
easily by lengthening the school day and the school year. 
Well, that is logical. The time on task people place all their 
emphasis on the time part; what the task is (let alone, should 
be) is not part of the slogan. No doubt the educational excel- 
lence part of the plan, as above, is to take care of that. 

The above is what the plans aim to do. All these plans then 
take up the how of it, to show that they are serious. 

Opening up the how is Tougher Student Discipline. That 
seems to be basic to all plans. Every plan agrees that disrup- 
tive students will not, from henceforth, stop others from 



70 Plans 

learning. They all use the same phrase — disruptive students. 
Some plans spell out this tougher discipline policy; others 
just say that they ain't putting up with it anymore. 

Spelling out takes the form of listing penalties for the stu- 
dent who may wish to disrupt. These seem not to be novel, 
in the main. Suspension from class, suspension from school, 
expulsion — presumably for continued, willful disruption, 
and after conventional sentences like detention, notes home, 
and parent conferences have been handed out. The plans 
seem to be saying that, while they can't think of any new 
penalties — they don't suggest jail sentences, for example, nor 
allow teachers to shoot disruptive students — they mean these 
punishments, now, to be carried out. 

So they say that students who continue to disrupt the pur- 
suit of excellence won't be around for very long. The plans 
do not interest themselves in the future excellence of those 
students who, for cause, may not be around the school any- 
more. One or two do stipulate that if a student is suspended 
from a class for a period of time, that student may not be 
placed in another class during that time, recognizing, at least, 
something about a real, common practice of schools and 
putting a stop to it. A couple of plans suggest the possibility 
of "alternative programs" for disruptive students, one even 
using the phrase school-within-a-school (thus warming my 
heart). 

All plans specify immediate suspension (and expulsion, if 
the deeds continue) for the traditional reasons — bad lan- 
guage, defiance of authority, insubordination, smoking, fight- 
ing, and now, the bringing to school of controlled substances. 
Only the California plan (the Hart Bill, SB 813) had a little 
footnote on the controlled substance part. While agreeing 
with the general tone of all other plans, this bill found it 
necessary to add "excepting for less than an ounce" of mari- 
juana. It then amends itself with a little note about more 
potent kinds of cannabis, which do not fall into the less-than- 
an-ounce immunity. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 71 

Homework reappears here, in the how-to, discipline sec- 
tion of these plans. That is, teachers will be "authorized" to 
"give" homework to those students who may have been, for 
cause, suspended. 

I believe that to be it about discipline. The plans, clearly, 
ain't playing around. I may add that the California Education 
Code, right around 1906, cited all of these indiscretions — 
fighting, smoking, defiance, etc. — as reason for suspension and 
expulsion. "Controlled substances" weren't mentioned, but 
the code did include, as reason for expulsion, "Filthy Habits!" 
which very possibly covered it. 

I must add a little concern of my own about the California 
footnote. It sounds to me just like the injunction we placed, 
at Spanish Main School and many another — ten, twelve? 
thirteen? years back — against girls' skirts being too short, 
thus provocative, and interrupting the pursuit of excellence. 
That ukase caused many a principal and vice-principal and 
counselor and teacher to have to carry around a measuring 
stick in order to measure, in the flesh, if some girl's skirt was 
in fact only three inches above the knee, or whatever the 
dress code stipulated. It caused many a girl, also, to spend 
most of her time deciding whether or not to obey the com- 
mand of the dress code, or to obey it sometimes and not 
others, or to disobey it flagrantly and then charge discrimi- 
nation and quote some amendment, or to disobey it by a half- 
inch and get to spend most of her time in school gleefully 
being measured by all those hapless adults. I'm sure that ac- 
tivity did not fit in with the pursuit of academic excellence, 
and I fear that the California protocol, as it isn't yet called 
but certainly will be called, will not help us in that pursuit 
either. 

We are still on how. How to do it — achieve excellence. 

All plans call for "greater involvement" of community 
leaders and especially of "business" leaders. They call for 
the involvement of university, college, community college 
and city college professionals to improve the curriculum, 



72 Plans 

improve "methodology" and "teaching strategies," provide 
leadership, show the teachers what to do. Alongside that, we 
ought to remember that a primary suspicion, behind and 
leading up to the plans, has been that these university, col- 
lege, etc., professionals have always prepared students badly, 
sometimes intentionally so, for the teaching profession. They 
have been accused of being at fault to a great degree for the 
incompetence of teachers everywhere. Perhaps the plans think 
they have learned something in the meantime. 

New, in the plans, is the heady agreement of "business 
leaders." In California, there is something like a round table 
of concerned businessmen, a big-time outfit it seems, which 
agrees that the pursuit of excellence must be supported. Not 
only that, but serious concern is demonstrated by the willing- 
ness to put up money for this pursuit — money, in the form of 
taxes! on businesses! 

Money for what? For Sputnik? No, this time for "an edu- 
cated work force." The business leaders claim that they are 
tired of employees who cannot read or write, can't add and 
subtract, and can't follow directions. Their expressed desire 
is that their employees who show them a high school diploma 
ought to be able to do these things, and they will spend 
money to make it so. They subscribe to the what and the 
how of the plans. (The present governor, certainly supported 
for election by these businessmen, has not yet believed them 
to be serious — granted, it's difficult to believe that business 
really wants to have itself taxed — and so has not yet funded 
any of the plans' measures which require money.*) 

It is true that cynics (see chapter 3) may read beyond the 
first paragraph of business reports in the paper and argue 
that what is really needed in the work force is a group of 
workers in service and fast-food industries, in the production 
lines in Silicon Valley . . . people who will show up for 

* In California, to everyone's surprise, the longer-day, longer-year money did 
get funded, which just goes to show you. This money became the subject of 
spirited bargaining, including many threats and a strike or two. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 73 

work on time to do a task (without going to the bathroom too 
often) which requires neither reading nor adding, nor a 
knowledge of biology, but only that kind of instruction 
which will enable them to be grateful for a job which is 
tedious, boring, and pays very little. Thus companies thrive. 
It may be that, at least in California, business executives 
ought to learn Spanish, for example; most of the work force 
imagined already knows it. The plans do not make comment, 
for that is not their purpose. 

All the plans recognize that principals and other adminis- 
trators must "learn, and use" better management skills. Here, 
we teachers agree. We don't know what these "skills" are, or 
should be, but we at Spanish Main are for it anyway. Learn 
'em and use 'em! Right, we say. In Tierra Firma School Dis- 
trict, we have a union /management committee going on right 
this moment, a committee which is trying to figure out a way 
for the district to "certify" that principals are "competent" 
to evaluate teachers. That's part of our reform bill (Hart) 
and must be done, otherwise the state will not fund the dis- 
trict. We can't begin to figure it out yet; the principals on 
the committee know, deep down, that they are competent 
(since they have been evaluating teachers for years) and the 
teachers on the committee believe that they are in no way 
competent, since they have been evaluating teachers for years. 

The very reason for the above leads us to the rock-bottom 
impulse, and impact, of all the plans. Once principals are 
"certified" to be competent at evaluation (and this will cer- 
tainly occur, no matter what the committee comes up with) — 
that will mean that they are able to spot those teachers who 
are incompetent, and begin the process of firing them. Not 
only that, but they will be able to point out those teachers 
who are truly great teachers, and thus begin the process of 
rewarding them. 

All of the plans get down, finally, to the carrot and the 



74 Plans 

stick. They recognize that the classroom teacher is at the root 
of good and evil in the schools (as we do: "We're the team! 
We hit the ball, or no one does!") and figure to reward the 
one and uproot the other. Thus, all plans try to simplify lay- 
offs, simplify firing procedures, try to limit due process, try 
to limit tenure rules, for the bad guys. On the other hand, 
then all plans envision some sort of merit pay for the good 
guys. 

The plans envision a kind of tracking system for teachers. 
Some will be judged to be in the high group (headed for Har- 
vard), some in the average group (headed for city college), and 
some in the low group, headed for a production-line job at 
Silicon Valley, until the company decides to relocate in 
Korea, at which time the teacher relocates at McDonald's or 
Chuck-E-Cheez. 

Of course, the idea is that the good ones, the teachers in 
the high group, will get paid more, and that will attract 
bright students to the classroom, because the pay will be 
good. That is the kind of thing businessmen understand. To 
prove it, the media tell us constantly that education majors 
in college are at the bottom of the class, intellectually. (The 
fact is that not one teacher in Tierra Firma School District 
was an education major in college.) However, once the evalu- 
ators are certified, then we can tell who is really good, and 
who is just OK, and who is worthless — something which 
earlier on had seemed very difficult — and get on with the 
pursuit rationally. 

Last — well, it is only I who mention it last; it is first and 
foremost in every plan — everyone in the schools needs to put 
in more hours. Students do not put in enough time in schools. 
To that end, almost every plan proposes to put up some 
money for schools which agree to work more hours. In Cali- 
fornia, that plan envisions a payoff of between twenty dollars 
to forty dollars for each student if the school will increase its 
minutes per day to, say, three hundred, and/or if it will in- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 75 

crease its instructional days to, say, two hundred. Most Cali- 
fornia elementary schools have instructional days of about 
240 minutes in grades one to three; our instructional year is 
about 177 days.* 

It is true that some analysts have calculated that if all the 
schools did increase their time on task to this extent, that the 
payoff in cash to the pursuit of excellence (and the public 
schools themselves) would about equal the national debt. It 
is thus no surprise that this incentive has not yet been funded 
by the governors. 

The money, of course, would have to go to the teachers 
who would have to work longer hours and more days; it may 
be that, since no state can afford the price so far. that those 
teachers found to have merit, by the certified evaluators, will 
be those agreeing to work longer for the same pay. Longer 
hours, at no cost, is quite a decent business proposition, and 
can be called dedication, if need be. 

It should be added that, in calling for longer school hours, 
the media and the politicians usually refer to such diverse 
societies as Japan, Soviet Russia, and Germany. We are urged 
to emulate their school hours, if nothing else. It is also true 
that in the same media, we can read or hear reports of Japa- 
nese educators complaining that their children have been 
only taught rote obedience, cannot think, and are committing 
suicide in great numbers — presumably because of their longer 
pursuit of excellence — and have come to America to get some 
tips about how to combat these ills. 

So it goes. These are the plans, comrades. Do they mean 
anything? Hell, I don't know. I'm only trying to outline 
them here, but it is hard not to comment, however briefly. 
However cynically. 



* In Tierra Firma, however, the upper grades and junior high students al- 
ready go 308 minutes. Yet we maintain we still have problems. What can that 
mean? Well, three more days then, try that. 



CHAPTER 



6 



Of Time and Merit: 

"What Are We Here For? To Work, or to Learn?' 



Of course, as the plans wound through state legislatures on 
their ways to becoming law, various groups attached riders to 
them. The AFT, the NEA, school board associations, princi- 
pals' organizations, PTA's — all had proposals meant to either 
strengthen or to weaken sections of the plans, and although 
all these proposals were made in the best interest of the 
schools, they often coincided with the best interest of the pro- 
posing group. The legislators had to try to please everyone 
and so inevitably the plans resemble the elephant being 
examined by blind men; from one place they resemble snakes, 
while from another nothing so much as a tree trunk. 

Many of the proposals are really just cold compresses to 
the headaches and exasperations of someone — someone dis- 
contented, in a particular way. Homework is a nice solution, 
for example, for the worried parent who feels that if the kid 
was home doing his homework, he wouldn't be out smoking 

76 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 77 

dope. The idea, however, does nothing for the teacher who 
has already been giving the homework, but sees that the kid 
isn't doing it because he is allowed by the parent to go out 
and smoke dope. 

Just so, it is wonderful for the teacher to hear that students 
may no longer disrupt the classroom, since teachers, through 
their organizations, have protested that if they did not have 
to spend all this time with disrupters, they could really teach 
and the other students really learn. The plans have heard the 
teachers and responded. The plans, although they do not say 
so, don't really mean to deal with violent students — those 
stories in the paper of the girl shooting up a school with her 
brother's .22, or rival gangs shooting it out from cars in front 
of the high school; these incidents are not "disruption," any 
more than a bomb is disruption. Disruption is the girl who 
gets up and sharpens her pencil just as I'm ready to begin 
part 3 of my marvelous retelling of the Trojan War, or at 
least it is if she does this every time just when I've gotten the 
class settled down and ready to attend, the students dying 
to learn, me dying to teach . . . Disruption is when I say 
nicely, Please wait to sharpen your pencil, and she says I have 
to sharpen it, how can I take notes otherwise? and / say, Well, 
you should have sharpened it beforehand! and she says. How 
could I? So-and-so took it from me and I had to take it back! 
How could I sharpen it if he . . . and he says, That's a lie! 
I never saw . . . ! The patiently and surreptitiously un- 
screwed desktop falling to the floor with a crash, the fountain 
squirting out fifteen feet, the resulting glee and uproar of the 
class, free of retribution and blame, free for the moment — 
so that while the legislature has heard the teachers and given 
them their due, they have probably not reached old Andy, 
who probably knows about as much about these reforms as I, 
in the fourth grade, did about the progressive movement. 

None of this does anything really for the teacher, who will 
continue to deal with it patiently, understanding the student, 
firmly, understanding the needs of the class, and finally with 



78 Of Time and Merit 

exasperation, saying in the teachers' room, This kid is driv- 
ing me nuts! It does little for the parent either, who phones 
up the school and wants to know how come the kid is kicked 
out of class for sharpening her pencil? 

Most plans heard the teachers too, on the subject of "ad- 
junct duties," as they are called in California. Those are 
duties, say teachers, which take them away from teaching 
school — bus duty before and after school, caf<:teria duty, 
playground duty, hall duty, detention duty. The California 
plan, at least, responded by removing adjunct duties from 
the evaluation sheet, which meant that principals would no 
longer evaluate teachers on the basis of excellence at these 
duties. That was, of course, the only objective item in the 
whole list — either the teacher was on time for duty or not, 
either made it to bus duty or not, or had a good excuse. 

The other items were always something like "maintains 
suitable learning environment," which could mean (and does 
mean) variously, that the teacher has pretty, decorated walls, 
or that the windows are open exactly right, or that the room 
is quiet, or that it is suitably animated, or that kids don't 
sharpen pencils while the teacher speaks . . . and then, 
something about learning, like "students demonstrate a year's 
growth, or are working up to their abilities." Added to that, 
usually something about "adherence to the district curricu- 
lum" — meaning you were teaching California Indians, not 
the Crimean War, There was enough in there for the prin- 
cipal to be boss with, and enough totally subjective and un- 
measurable for the teachers' security. After the sixties, refer- 
ences to personal attributes disappeared from the evaluation 
sheet in most places, certainly in Tierra Firma, where out- 
raged teachers no longer read that their dress is inappro- 
priate, that they are bad for morale, that they have halitosis. 

Still, taking away adjunct duties from the boss left a hole, 
apparently, and the relatively harmless clause was replaced 
by an ominous "appropriate teaching strategies" in many 
plans. But since that seemed to imply that some strategies 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 79 

were better than others (and for strategies, we teachers read 
styles!) and it certainly seemed as if principals were to decide 
this matter of style, then these administrators better be certi- 
fied as competent to do so and the committee in the district 
to make recommendations concerning this better have some 
teachers on it to protect their interests. 

After all, we at Spanish Main remember Him calling a 
faculty meeting for the purpose of informing us that He had 
been in all our classrooms, and not a one of us could be ob- 
served passing back the kids' papers correctly. We can see 
this, or something like it, getting in there with these strate- 
gies, and, to head it off, we teachers on the committee argue 
that teaching is an art, and as such, different teachers have 
different styles, all of which may be excellent, if different, 
and that principals must agree to this if they are to be "com- 
petent" to judge us. The issue is not settled yet. In the end, 
the school board will have to make a Policy on strategies; the 
plans have listened to the school board's association too and 
given these boards final authority over all this. By and large, 
school boards are not capable of making such a policy, so 
that in the end some statement containing the word indi- 
vidual will likely emerge, which will satisfy everyone, except 
whoever wanted strategies in there in the first place. 

(What method should we use for passing out papers, did 
you ask? Well, in the interest of efficiency and time on task, 
we ought to face the class, where the students are sitting in 
rows. We ought to have arranged the papers beforehand in 
order, so that when we give the stack to the first student in 
a row, that student simply takes the top one and passes the 
stack back to the second student, who also takes the top one, 
and so on, down the rows. We will have wasted no time in a 
noninstructional activity; there has been no reason for dis- 
order or disruption.) 

It is clear that the plans really had two major objectives in 
mind, objectives which, to be sure, have been there in the 
minds' eyes of politicians, educators, media, and public for 



80 Of Time and Merit 

some time, and whose time has come. These notions are the 
longer school day, and some form of merit pay for teachers, 
and these have been approached much more confidently and 
definitely. 

Early one morning in the Dallas airport, I read in the paper 
that Texas educators were calling for students to spend an 
"eight-hour day" at school. This was to be all students, grades 
one through twelve. More time in school; a longer school 
day, and more days, has been a feature of every plan. I could 
never see why, unless, given what everyone thinks of as the 
"failure" of the progressive movement, the failure of Sputnik 
and the New Math, the failure of open classrooms and coun- 
terculture, and the failure of back-to-basics/ phonics, a lot of 
people have just said to themselves (whether at Columbia 
University or the Department of Education or at the editor's 
desk in Dallas) that, goddammit! the longer you do some- 
thing, the better you'll get at it, and we'll just keep 'em in 
there longer. Anyway, we've already tried ever' other god- 
damn thing . . . 

Of course. There has, after all, never been any research to 
corroborate such an idea. Indeed, there has been plenty to 
suggest the opposite . . . all the way from major experimen- 
tal studies which showed that twelve-year-olds who never 
went to school at all "progressed" a year on standardized tests 
simply because they had grown a year older, a fact not de- 
pendent upon plans, to someone like Max Weber comment- 
ing that his only true ideas came when he was doing nothing, 
or perhaps shaving, never when he was "studying." Sure, a 
comrade of mine, in our old school-within-a-school, wrote 
upon her chalkboard, every day, "One learns that which one 
practices," for the edification of her students. What she 
meant, though, was that the students should "practice" (in 
this case, read) intently for some fifteen or twenty minutes a 
day. That would be plenty, she thought. (Indeed, our whole 
school, Rabbit Mountain, was finally predicated on this no- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 81 

tion, that the students should do intensively, and for a short 
time, one thing — in this case, learn to read. Did it work? We 
thought it did; I leave out here any description of disrup- 
tions during the rest of the day.) 

Anyway, thanks to the Dallas airport and the morning 
paper, I'm no longer confused about the issue. After all, the 
studies to the contrary ^vere part of some progressive move- 
ment; Max Weber was a genius; Rabbit Mountain was a 
radical, alternative school, however "within" a real school. 
None of those things counts, as we know. 

Dallas gave it away. The point is, the paper said, quoting 
the Texas educators, that students will "work an eight-hour- 
day, just like the regular work force." 

Now we get it, I think. 

I thought it nice, though, as the article went on and I, 
having nothing else to do, read it all, that the main objec- 
tions to this eight-hour plan came from the football coaches. 
Football is a major occupation, or preoccupation, in Texas, 
and the coaches could see that this eight-hour day was going 
to cut into practice. You can get the notion, from some Texas 
coaches, that attending class, for some good football players, 
is just a pain in the ass, something of no value, but which you 
just have to put up with. 

The Texas educators were talking about an eight-to-five 
job of being students. At the end of the article, however, I 
noticed that they had paid attention to the coaches (and per- 
haps to the fact that they lived in Texas) and had proposed 
that, although students must stay in school until five o'clock, 
the hours from 3:00 until 5:00 could be spent in "extracur- 
ricular" activities, supposing that the student had a certain 
bent or interest in same. I got it; that meant art, music, the- 
ater, clubs of any sort, or — football practice. 

"Just like the regular work force." So it is not complicated 
at all. By recommending an eight-to-five day, the Texas edu- 
cators, and the plans of every other state in this union, the 
businessmen, the politicians (note there's nothing at all in 



82 Of Time and Merit 

these plans about education, no time to wonder about learn- 
ing) just means that an educated work force is one which will 
spend eight hours on the job, and not go to sharpen a pencil 
when they spozed to be putting out the product. 

That ought to be it. Still, I can't help it! I have this clip- 
ping from some magazine or other, I no longer know, which 
says (written by some guy named Rutter, the clipping says) 
that homework is but of "symbolic importance"; it empha- 
sizes the school's "expectation that students have the ability 
and self-discipline needed to ivork without direct super- 
vision." Students, in short, ain't to learn anything from 
homework, except symbolically to work. 

The idea that if you're paid more you'll work 
harder may apply to selling encyclopedias. If 
you're a lion-tamer, you're not going to work 
any harder just because you'll be paid more. 
The job of a teacher is more like a lion-tamer, 
I think. 

— A L Shanker, President 
AFT, AFL-CIO 

I've tried hard to find something to say, pro or con, about 
merit pay — something that has not already been said hun- 
dreds of times. Shanker's remark, above, is one point of view. 
You must work hard, as a schoolteacher, simply in order to 
avoid being eaten alive. Subduing the lion's natural appetite 
comes first — after that is assured, maybe you'll be able to 
teach him a trick or two. 

Merit pay has been around a long time in the corporate/ 
industrial world, but even there no one seems satisfied with 
it. No research can be found which agrees that the salesman 
works harder or is more successful at his trade if he is given 
extra pay for "merit." 

It is, anyway, quite beside the point whether one works 
hard or not. Success is the point. But even there, sales man- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 83 

agers report that no one is satisfied if the person who demon- 
strably sells the most of whatever product it is, is paid more. 
The other salesmen argue that they had bad territories, mix- 
ups in their deliveries, no cooperation from the front office, 
storms — otherwise they would have been right up there. 

Teachers, like salesmen, all believe that they are among 
the very best at their job. You simply must believe that in 
order to continue teaching (and probably selling). 

You begin to teach as a lion-tamer, to be sure and, if not 
eaten up, go on to ask other teachers what they do here and 
there, what "works" for them, and quite soon, by some 
curious amalgam, you develop a way to work in the classroom 
which suits you and which you think is best . . . best, con- 
sidering the various and vast distances between what you must 
do, want to do, and can do. 

You think it best, for you and the students, or for the stu- 
dents and you. 

I certainly think that my "style" or "strategy" in the class- 
room is the best. That's why I do it that way, I also know that 
my opinion is not shared by the other teachers at Spanish 
Main, each of whom, quite rightly, prefers his own. 

The whole idea of merit pay, then, seems to founder at this 
point. If we all think that we are among the best, how are we 
to reward the best? 

If we must decide who is the best, then who is to decide, 
and on what basis? 

The plans suggest a committee, even that this committee 
(in most cases) be composed of a majority of teachers, so that 
teachers can see that their professional judgment is valued. 
Yet, if the above is true, it doesn't seem likely that teachers 
can make such a decision, nor has any basis for a decision 
been provided. 

The famous Tennessee plan decided to solve the problem 
by having independent teams of evaluators roam around 
Tennessee judging on the merit of teachers. This notion did 
away with the sordid suspicions of local favoritism, school 



84 Of Time and Merit 

board politics, and ass-kissing, to be sure, but doesn't appear 
to help with the main problem. For this traveling team will 
either have to announce its visits in advance, or not. If they 
do, the scene will be like an army inspection, or Mayor Daley 
erecting fences to hide the slums of Chicago at convention 
time. The teacher, if not crazy, will redo bulletin boards, get 
every kid's goddamn pencil sharpened in advance, send 
Andy to the library, or somewhere, figure out a wonderful 
demonstration lesson (well practiced in advance by all), and 
all will go well. 

But if the team drops in as a surprise, they may come into 
my seventh-grade reading period to find me either standing, 
elbows resting on my bookcase, or sitting behind my desk, 
reading from Captains Courageous, or from Sports Illus- 
trated. I may be oblivious to their entrance, in fact. (I am 
not oblivious to kids talking, copying homework, wandering 
around — my ear is fine-tuned to these sounds, the sounds of 
activities which are forbidden since they aren't reading — but 
how is the visiting team to know that?) 

The visiting team, concluding that this teacher is not 
teaching at all, let alone well, is not dedicated, doesn't give 
a damn, certainly deserves no merit pay (if he deserves to be 
paid at all!) — the team has just missed out on one of the best 
teachers in the world! They are unaware of it. 

Too late, then, for my thoughtful discourse on what teach- 
ing is, how students learn, etc.! 

Has something been left out in this discussion? I want to 
cover everything about this now; I never want to return to it. 

Well, the basis is left out. The standard, criterion, mea- 
sure, rule of thumb . . . anything, any way by which to tell 
the great teachers from the simply OK teachers. The stan- 
dard, etc., by which to tell the wonderful teaching strategies 
from the mediocre ones. 

Are the great teachers more entertaining? Have they better 
intellectual command of their subjects? Have they greater 
rapport with the students? Are they more efficient, provide 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 85 

more time on task? Are they more aware of their students' 
ethnic backgrounds, social class, personal or family problems? 
All of the above? Well, some of the above? 

No one knows. 

Does anyone know whether students actually learn more 
from great teachers, if you could ever find out who were the 
great teachers? 

No one knows that either. The sentence just above sounds 
insane. 

In the city where I live, right next to Tierra Firma, the 
school administration has often released to the newspaper the 
bad news that on a normal day, about 50 percent of high 
school students are actually in school. Only if attendance 
drops significantly below 50 percent do they wonder if some- 
thing unusual is going on. One main problem with high 
schools, then, is that half of the students don't go to them 
regularly. If we believe the current reformers, this leads to 
low test scores and an uneducated work force. 

Is the answer to this problem more time in school, more 
days in school, more homework? Will another hour each day 
bring these discontented students back to the high school 
from the beach, the movies, their jobs, the street corners? I 
think it more likely that there is another ten or fifteen per- 
cent of the school population who are now just barely hang- 
ing in there each day, just making it to the last bell by the 
skin of their teeth, barely managing to control their exasper- 
ation, frustration, and boredom, as it is. Another hour in 
such a day, another hour's homework, one more English, 
math, science course may just drive them over the edge into 
real discontent, to where the beach or McDonald's looks 
pretty good to them. Well, those left will compose an edu- 
cated work force. 

Has it been shown that the great teachers (if we knew who 
they were!) in the high schools have a higher percentage of 
students attending regularly? 



86 Of Time and Merit 

One could, of course, consider paying all teachers more 
money, although that would not require any plan. Failing 
that, I'd agree to pay some teachers more money on merit, 
if we could just decide the issue by lottery, or matching pen- 
nies, two out of three, and change every year. 

At least we will have dealt with merit. No living human 
being can make any sense out of time. 



CHAPTER 



A School Kit 



Model airplane kits, when I was young, could be bought for 
a dime, and contained plans and balsa wood parts. Glue was 
not included. 

Finished, the model looked like an airplane, or, at least, 
more like an airplane than it did anything else. You would 
not have confused it with a model car, for instance, or with a 
school. 

It looked like a plane and it was fun to put together and 
even to admire. It was not an airplane though, and we never 
thought that it was. We knew you could not get in it and fly 
to New York. 

There has been some mention of strategies in the classroom, 
with the clear implication that some are better than others. 
(We now know that every teacher still alive believes that too, 
and knows that those better strategies are his own.) 

Nevertheless, earlier on a strategy about passing out papers 

87 



88 A School Kit 

was mentioned. This strategy pointed out that if we would 
just pass out papers this way, we teachers wouldn't lose time 
from our instructional purpose. It was also pointed out that 
we weren't, not a one of us, doing it this way. This strategy 
didn't belong to any one of us. 

It may seem to be a small thing, but the question is, Why 
aren't we all doing it? 

Can't you even get with it enough to pass out papers right? 
I hear the plans asking. 

Take a look at this strategy. First of all, we arrange the 
papers according to rows, first to last. That takes a little time, 
but maybe we can have our student aide, Pamela, do 
that . . . anyway, assume we do that. 

But wait . . . some of us find that students move their 
seats every once in a while. Kids sit happily in some place for 
a while, and then find they would rather sit somewhere else. 
They do that for various reasons — they changed friends, so- 
and-so is getting them in trouble, so-and-so is not trouble 
enough. Some teachers let the kids move, depending on the 
outcome of the move; others have a firm seating chart, and 
no one moves. If you got your papers all in order, by rows, 
but then that morning you find that some kid has moved, 
that's it for the strategy. No one knows when a kid will de- 
cide to move. So therefore, no kid moves. OK, let's go on. 

Next, you stand in front of the class and give out the pa- 
pers by rows. The first kid takes the top one, the next kid 
ditto . . . and so on. In three minutes it's all over, fini, c'est 
tout; on with instruction. 

But wait! What if one of the kids in the row takes the bot- 
tom one, by mistake? Kid wasn't listening when you ordered 
the strategy. What if some kid, not by mistake, decides to 
look through the papers and, say, yell. So-and-so got an F! 
Hey, you got an F, you dummy; or some other more pejora- 
tive word. Or, as it may be. So-and-so cheated, that's why he 
got an A, Mr. Herndon! This ain't my paper! cries the first 
kid. You bitch! yells the second. Did I cheat? the third ap- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 89 

peals to someone next to him. You copied me! yells a fourth, 
fifth, . . . 

This clearly is not working. In order for it to be working 
the teacher will have had to spend a week discussing, clari- 
fying the procedure, the strategy, even if the students have 
seen this same procedure for seven years. In order for it to 
work, the teacher will have to shout, command, order, 
threaten — all with great and intense vigor — in order to make 
the class sit still, shut up, pick up the right paper, not com- 
ment upon the work of others, and get these papers passed 
out, so that we can get on with learning. 

This strategy, then, is fine for a school kit. 

Now how it works in a school . . . well, I don't know, I 
never thought about it much. I guess I just wait until some 
day when the papers are ready to hand back, until some such 
time as the students are individually engaged in some class- 
work — or supposed to be engaged in it — and I'm going 
around helping them or encouraging them or insisting upon 
it and there is always a student or two dying to pass out 
papers and I give them the papers and they pass them out. 
While it is true that many of the same comments and accusa- 
tions may arise, and that there may be arguments about who 
gets to pass out the papers, it does not seem to be quite the 
same as the above. It has not been a big deal, but just, rather, 
a part of the day, easily handled, and the papers are, sooner 
or later, passed out. 

That is the difference between a school kit and a school. 
In the school kit, nothing may be allowed to disturb the strat- 
egy, for that is what the strategy is there for, to be undis- 
turbed. In a school, attended by the common people, and 
taught by the common people, the controversies attendant 
upon the passing out of papers are part of the instructional 
day, as interesting and valuable, I think, as much else; above 
all else, unavoidable, unless you have decided to spend all 
your time, and all your students' time, in this school kit, 
practicing and learning how to pass out papers. 



CHAPTER 



8 



Chanh 

"The Helping Hand Strikes Again. 
— J o H N Holt 



When Chanh came into my social studies class, some years 
back, sometime in November I think, I didn't quite know 
what to do with him. The problem was that it was social 
studies, and the silly social studies book, which I was always 
being ordered to use, and that Chanh spoke and read no En- 
glish. He may have been the first Asian of this particular sort 
that I came across in class. That just means he wasn't City 
Chinese or Tokyo Japanese whose father, a banker, was trans- 
ferred out here to the West Coast for a bit. Refugee, escapee, 
emigre, tourist? I never quite knew. 

Since I didn't know what to do with him, I didn't do any- 
thing at all. I mean, I came by his seat two or three times 
each period and said. How you doing? and he grinned and I 
could see that he was looking at his Non-English-Speaking 



90 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 91 

(NES) dictionary or book or perhaps just pretending to — 
well, my recommendation to teachers has always been, in case 
of doubt, do nothing. I don't mean that this advice is often 
taken, and certainly was never asked for. It is hard for teach- 
ers to do nothing, just as it is for kids to do nothing. Both 
seem, when faced with a situation where they don't know 
how to proceed, to fuck up. They do so with different inten- 
tions, of course. 

After a time Chanh discovered that unlined, white ditto 
paper was available for use in the class, that he could go get 
it, take it back to his desk, and draw on it. He discovered it 
by scientific method — saw it in a neat pile near my desk, saw 
other students go get it, saw them draw on it, tried it him- 
self, awaited some severe blow — receiving none, he was in 
business. 

He left the NES book and NES dictionary alone then and 
drew on the white paper. Now when I passed by his desk he 
was always drawing, mostly animals — drawing with a nice, 
fine, tracery line which I admired. He looked up at me tenta- 
tively as I passed, to see, I thought, if it was OK. He sharp- 
ened his pencil a lot, perhaps happy to see that the pencil 
sharpener was also readily available. 

It ought to be mentioned that old Chanh, I knew, was en- 
rolled in two English as a second language classes in our 
school (ESL, we say) on his way to graduating from being 
NES to LES (Limited-English-Speaking) and thence, if all 
went well, to be mainstreamed. 

As it happens, I was living down on Clement Street at the 
time, and therefore dropped in often after work at the Lone 
Star Bar. The Lone Star was run by a guy from Arkansas, a 
retired army sergeant of artillery, and its clientele came 
mostly from the Presidio, the old San Francisco army base, 
thus enlisted men from Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, 
and such. The guy's name was Jones, called Jonesy, and he 
knew I was a teacher. One day he asked me if I had any kid 



92 Chanh 

who could draw good. What he needed, he said, was some- 
body who could draw a good, big picture of this razorback 
hog, which he had a good picture of to copy, and the reason 
he needed it was that the Arkansas-Texas football game was 
coming up on the TV that Thanksgiving, everyone would be 
there at the Lone Star Bar, and he needed it to jive the damn 
Texans with. I could see that, and allowed as how I could 
handle it. 

So I gave the Lone Star picture of the razorback to Chanh, 
provided a great big piece of good, white drawing paper, and 
Chanh started off. He drew it in pencil first, stopping over 
and over again to use the pencil sharpener. Later I produced 
red and black markers, the big, thick kind, and we'd say 
words to each other like color, and point oiu to each other 
where red, where black. In any case, we fooled with it every 
day for a while, and we could see it was going to be nice. 

Now the picture Ld got from the Lone Star had a slogan 
over it, saying, "Go Razorbacks!" One day Chanh looked up 
from his drawing and asked me, "What is Way-Zo-Bak?" 

We went round and round about razorbacks, and as the 
drawing was done I felt Chanh had something of a notion of 
what it was all about — football, the hated Texas Longhorns 
(what is "Longhorn"?), the TV, Thanksgiving Day. In fact, I 
began to feel that, for people doing nothing, we had made 
considerable headway. I took the razorback drawing over to 
the Lone Star, after promising Chanh to give it back to him 
afterward. It was truly a good picture — a mean, snorting, 
bristly hog with bad-looking tusks, done in heavy reds and 
blacks so that you could see it from the bar. Jonesy thought 
it was wonderful and bought me a drink, in itself something 
unusual. 

Well, a good lesson for all, I thought. I had started Chanh 
off, and also Jonesy. By and by, they'd get together. 

But the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, in came 
Chanh. He was crying. It was third period. He came up to 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 93 

me at the beginning of third period with tears rolling down 
his face. 

I figured that some kids had been tormenting him, and got 
mad. "What's the matter with Chanh?" I demanded of every- 
one, really angry. No one knew. They were all innocent. Fi- 
nally some kid said, "I had him last period, and he wasn't 
crying then." He hadn't done nothing, the kid meant. 

"What's wrong, Chanh?" I said. I figured someone had 
done something to him during passing period. Chanh was a 
little tiny kid, very skinny, and he looked like another Chanh 
whom I had in class just this last year and whom the black 
kids called E.T. 

"Way-Zo-Bak lose!" he cried, snuffling and wiping his eyes 
with his sleeve. "Mr. Herndon, Way-Zo-Bak lose!" He fairly 
hollered out the last, full of anguish. 

Holy Christ! I'd watched the game myself and it was true 
that Arkansas lost, and very likely old Jonesy had lost some 
money, as well as having taken a lot of shit from the damn 
Texans; but Chanh? We began to talk, in our odd way, and 
I got it that his whole family, his father and mother, his 
grandmother, his sisters, some cousins, had all watched the 
game, and that when those Way-Zo-Bak lost, they had all 
gone into mourning. As if Chanh's picture had been a kind 
of talisman and, not having worked, it Avas a bad sign for all. 
No, he did not want the picture back. 

I put my arm around him and consoled him and all, and 
told him it wasn't so bad, and tried to get it over to him 
about next year. I thought he got that, and told him that his 
picture would stay there until next year at the Lone Star (God 
knows what he thought the Lone Star was!) and then, next 
year, maybe, Way-Zo-Bak luin! 

So perhaps it was OK. Doubtless I could have informed 
Chanh that he ought to try an s, as in "Way-Zo-Bak5." Well, 
I didn't, and I know that Chanh spent the next weeks until 
Christmas vacation with his NES book and his NES diction- 
ary. Occasionally he would bring up one or the other and ask 



94 Chanh 

me something. He didn't come back to school after Christmas 
vacation and, as usual, the school didn't say why, or where 
he had gone. 

At that time there were a lot of people like Chanh going 
to Minnesota, so perhaps he went there. I'd hope not, since 
Minnesota lose! Maybe his old man was a banker, or a real 
estate agent, and he got to go to L.A. 



CHAPTER 



9 



Pamela Brown 



Last year, the girl who was sharpening her pencil just when 
I was going to begin part 3 of my installments of the Trojan 
War was very likely to be Pamela Brown. We've already been 
through what I said, and she said, and the rest of the class 
then got to say. 

This year, old Pamela is in the eighth grade, and eighth 
graders, at Spanish Main school, get to be classroom aides, 
supposing they can get some teacher to agree to it. Often the 
reason they want to be aides is that they don't care for the 
other offering of the school, as far as electives are concerned. 
The eighth graders get to choose two, from among art, for- 
eign language (Spanish, French), music, shop, home ec, me- 
dia, journalism, and yearbook. There are also library aides, 
health office aides, and main office aides. We don't have any 
strategies for all this; we just offer it. 

Pamela had apparently chosen some of the above, but by 
the third week of school could see that one of them wasn't 

95 



96 Pamela Brown 

going to work out. She asked me, could she be my aide? Sure, 
I said, although uncertain about what I would have her do. 
In the end, another comrade and I shared Pamela, first pe- 
riod, finding flunky work for her to do, and it has been OK. 
Officially, my comrade has Pamela put grades in the book, do 
this and that; I have her pass out papers. 

I've also another plan for her; she is to take on three stu- 
dents in my first-period class, all certifiably bright, but who 
are no good (don't do the work, don't pay attention, and so 
on) and get them in line. They are all good friends of hers, 
as I know. I tell her if they flunk, she flunks. She argues 
against this plan. She knows that aides are supposed to get 
A's just for doing this flunky work. You're the teacher, she 
tells me, not me! 

For the first two quarters of this year, the three got two C 
minuses and one D. Pamela got an A. You would think that 
would convince her that the whole plan, the strategy, was 
bullshit. But it didn't. She is still exhorting the three (when 
done with passing out my papers, done with flunky work for 
my comrade) to get to work, otherwise Mr. Herndon will be 
giving me a bad grade! She is angry at them, at the same time 
as she is running about the classroom, exchanging gossip, 
egging cats on, being, as she was before, disruptive. I would 
not get no merit pay, just on account of Pamela. 

It is true that now, the three are doing better. Bernard, for 
one, is heading for an A. Yolanda, all set for a B. Well, the 
third, not doing a hell of a lot better. A C, maybe. Better 
than a D. Whose strategy is responsible for this improvement, 
mine or Pamela's? 

Never mind. Let me report about just this last Thursday. 
I've "given" part 3 of the Trojan War, to the class, on 
Wednesday, This chapter is about the bloody Greeks, after 
eight years in Troy, raiding those little islands around there. 
Well, one night, at this island — What island? asks some 
pedant; I don't know, I say, pointing to the map, there's a 
million little islands there, never mind that anyway, and I go 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 97 

on to describe the problem with Cryseis and Bryseis, Aga- 
memnon and Achilles, where Achilles, full of wrath, says he 
isn't going to fight for Agamemnon or the Greeks. 

Privately, I plan to deal with the pedant later, I do know 
the island, but that ain't the point. 

You all better write this story today, I say, since you'll for- 
get by tomorrow. Also, I'm erasing the names off the board 
at the end of the period. 

I've told my story, about fifteen minutes' worth, and I 
want them to "summarize" it — write down the story — now. 
I've no other plan for the day. Thus the threat. These are 
hard names; Cryseis, Bryseis, Achilles, Agamemnon, Ulysses. 

That's Wednesday. Pamela's kids, Bernard and all, natu- 
rally don't do it. Their deadline, as I've told them, is Thurs- 
day. The deadline for the other students is Friday. How 
come, etc., has already been dealt with, and Pamela is in 
agreement. Because you'll wait till Friday, she says, and then 
you won't get started till the last ten minutes, and then you'll 
forget it and then you just won't do it, and I'll get an F. That 
is what Pamela always did, and she knows that she is right. 
So do they. 

On Thursday, I start working around the room, helping 
here, exhorting there, as usual on Thursday. It's their day to 
work, get the assignments done, ready for Friday. Over in the 
corner, I see Pamela holding court with her students and 
some others. Hell, I think, and go over to straighten this out, 
get everyone seated, working, and so on. They are all stand- 
ing up, arguing loudly, and the place is a mess. 

Full of wrath myself, I plan to throw out a couple, and 
lecture the rest. To my surprise, Pamela seems to welcome 
my advance. Mr. Herndon! she cries. 

Ain't it true that the ol' King Agamemnon stole Achilles' 
girlfriend, and now he ain't going to fight and the Greeks 
can't win without him? And that's why the whole thing hap- 
pened later, because he took his woman, because he's the 
king? 



98 Pamela Brown 

All in one breath. Pamela is mad. These seventh graders 
are arguing with her. 

And Achilles said he was going to kill him, but Ulysses said 
calm down, only a woman, just give it up man, so Achilles 
said, OK, but I ain't fighting for him, or you! 

Pamela didn't hear the story yesterday, Wednesday, since 
she was working for my comrade, down the hall. She heard 
it last year in my language class. 

Pamela Brown remembers it. Pamela Brown can say 
Achilles, she can say Cryseis and Bryseis, she can say Ulysses. 

Pamela Brown can say Agamemnon with ease. Can Cap- 
tains of Industry do that? Can Reagan do that? Can Bill 
Honig do it? 

I myself was as happy as any lark. 



PART II 



Some Good Schools 



You ought to teach a child a ran- 
dom combination of fantasy^ simple 
truth and outright lies. The Giant's 
Garden, cows eat grass, and pigs can 
fly. That will serve to keep the 
child's mind alert, down to earth, 
and wary. 

Jack Spicer 



CHAPTER 



10 



Summertime 

No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of 
proportion, above all things, that Brookfield 
ought to teach — not so much Latin or Greek 
or Chemistry or Mechanics. And you couldn't 
expect to test that sense of proportioyi by 
setting papers and granting certificates. 
— M R . Chips 



It seems to be my fate to run across obsessed dogs. In How 
to Survive, I wrote about the old, obsessed Bolinas dog, 
with its tennis ball. I realize now that I also mentioned dogs 
running into classrooms — perhaps they had to be obsessed 
too, in order to do such a thing. 

In the summertime, as I began to write much of the fore- 
going, Arpine and I were house-sitting for friends who were 
taking a trip to Europe. The place itself was just far enough 
from the bay to be hot in the summer, it had a nice garden 
to fool with, and plenty of stuff to water, so that much time 
could be spent in that kind of work which gives one a feeling 
of having worked and having done right, without having to 

101 



102 Summertime 

know anything — the perfect atmosphere for writing. There 
was a swimming pool, and it was usually some ninety degrees 
outside. 

There was also a middle-aged German Shepherd bitch 
whose name was Anna K. but whom I, for some reason, im- 
mediately renamed Billie Jean. We had been warned not to 
try to pet Billie Jean, or to let her out of the backyard; had 
been advised that she would, and should, sleep at the foot of 
our bed, and that she did not like men. These rules were not 
for our protection, since Billie was not vicious and wouldn't 
bite; they were for hers. 

Fair enough. The injunction against men proved true. 
After a week or two Arpine could pet Billie; when / reached 
out my hand she fled. Jack and Jay, my sons, came by to stay 
a bit; neither could succeed in petting Billie. Not even Jay? 
Jesus! Jay has been known to have squirrels crawl into his 
lap, wild ducks alight on his head, rattlesnakes lick his toes 
. . . Billie Jean fled. 

Now, when I (or any of us, but I'll stick to me) go into the 
pool, Billie's obsession gets into action. I sit outside in the 
patio, read the paper, write a few words, and decide it's time 
for a swim. I plunge in. Billie Jean hightails it in a number 
of directions, one of which produces an old, beat-up ball, 
about the size of a Softball but with no insides, so that it is 
crushable and may be easily snapped up by Billie Jean. 

OK. She gets it, and, as I swim or dive or float, Billie 
rushes around the pool lickety-split, the ball in her mouth, 
pursuing me wherever I go, wherever I end up after a lap, a 
dive . . . there is Billie Jean, ball in her mouth. 

Billie Jean is a big dog, she is confined to this backyard 
mostly, and / know that she wants me to throw the ball for 
her to chase. When I surface at one end or side of the pool or 
another, she is right there. The rules say that she is supposed 
to drop the ball, or let me take it from her jaws. Then I will 
throw it, she will happily chase it, I will swim or dive, she 
will find me, bring back the ball, give it to me, I will throw 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 103 

it . . . and then, of course, when I tire of the game (Billie 
is not supposed to get tired of the game) we quit, and I go 
back to writing or to watering. 

Yeah, but old Billie won't drop the ball. She wants me to 
throw the ball, but she can't stand to give it to me first so 
that I can throw it. I want to throw the ball too, but she 
won't give it to me. 

It's a standoff. I come up at the shallow end of the pool. 
I've swum three laps underwater easily — I'm trying for five, 
recapturing, as I do every summer, my youth. There's Billie, 
ball in mouth, a foot away. I reach. No deal. I go away a bit. 
She approaches. I come back. She retreats. I feign indiffer- 
ence. Then, old Billie, feigning indifference too, just lets go 
of the ball, which falls into the water, and she walks away 
from it, as if totally uninterested in it. She heads for the 
house. 

The ball is now an inch from my nose, floating in the 
water. What shall I do? The whole thing runs against the 
eternal Rules for Dogs and Men (I don't want to hear any- 
one say, well, those are Men's rules: those rules are made by 
Dogs and Men). 

Do I pick up the ball, or not? Well, it may be, it don't 
make a damn bit of difference. But if I'm as crazy and ob- 
sessed as she is, then I must refuse to pick up the ball, just let 
it float around there in the pool, teach her a lesson! main- 
taining that the Rules say she has to bring it to me, of her 
own free will. Otherwise, there ain't no game. 

But I am not obsessed, I say to myself, and so I grab the 
ball. The instant I grab it, Billie Jean comes roaring out of 
wherever she was lurking and I fire the ball out into that part 
of the yard she's allowed to go in, and Billie rushes after it, 
grabs it in her jaws, rushes back to me in the pool and . . . 
and? well, we know that she has learned her lesson, lets me 
take the ball from her jaws, throw it, she chases it, brings it 
back, we'll now play ball from now on according to the 
rules . . . 



104 Summertime 

It doesn't happen. 

Billie Jean does not give me the ball. There has been no 
transfer, as some people I know are wont to say. The scene 
above has taken close to an hour to come to closure (same 
kind of word) — well, closure meaning when Billie Jean gives 
me the ball and I throw it, and Billie Jean gets to chase it, 
and we understand each other. That's what we're here for. 
From now until the next throw will take another hour. I give 
it up, and get out of the pool. I've got other things to do, 
man. 

No sense of proportion. 

I taught school for the first time in Heidelberg, Ger- 
many . . . 

It's summertime. Summer vacation. 

We do not call it vacation in the union — instead, it is a 
seasonal layoff. We have heard, all of us, all of our working 
lives, about as how we get two months' paid vacation and we 
are sick and tired of hearing it. We don't get paid, we argue. 
We get paid, poorly, we insist, for 180 days' work, and then 
get laid off, unpaid, the rest of the year. 

(Then why not keep school open all year round? ask our 
nonteaching friends and critics, inevitably. You don't under- 
stand, we answer, rather weakly, and begin to change the 
subject.) 

But it's still summertime, time to fool around with Billie, 
time, above all, to not-be working. Time to be writing about 
. . . schools, classes, teachers, students? But we teachers are 
not-teaching in the classroom, not-working, it's summertime 
and we can't be thinking about all that. It's all gone for now. 
(It will come back shortly.) I can't be thinking about drink- 
ing fountains or Chanh. The memories fade — the mind 
wanders. All to the good. 

Thus, Heidelberg. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 105 

I didn't need a teaching job in Heidelberg at all. I was 
twenty-six. I had a job, and plenty else to do. I was working 
for the army as a postal clerk, moonlighted as a kind of door- 
man in a student jazz cellar, a so-called Cave, I had taken up 
playing the oboe and was practicing three hours, at least, 
every day ... I particularly didn't need a job in a school. 

I thought I had come to the end of the line with schools, 
back in Berkeley. Graduate school had made itself clear to 
me; you were now supposed to actually do something — write 
papers, do research, hell, do something! I had been quite 
content to listen to everyone in town, thus to learn, and later 
perhaps even to orate, agitate some myself, but this new re- 
quirement ... I quit school and went to work in a small 
factory making a tool called a Shop-Smith, an all-purpose 
machine with a saw, lathe, and drill, which could do every- 
thing. 

It was the first time that I had ever been not-going to 
school. (Well, a year and a half during the war, going to sea, 
but that was on account of the war. I mean, the first time 
without any excuse.) I was quite satisfied with the Shop- 
Smith job, and even more so with my new image as worker, 
which gave me a certain prestige, I thought, at campus politi- 
cal meetings among friends and enemies who were, after all, 
only students. In the end, however, I gave up this trade and 
sailed off to Europe, ending up broke in Heidelberg, where 
you could find a job at the American army headquarters. 

The University of Maryland had an overseas division there, 
and ran, among other things, adult education courses for 
American army and civilian personnel. As it turned out, the 
person teaching one of these courses became ill, and went 
back home to America. The guy in charge of these courses 
was a frequent visitor to the jazz cave, and one evening asked 
me if I'd like to take over the course. 

What course? History of Art. If there was any subject on 
earth that I knew nothing about, it was the history of art. 
That fact did not deter me, apparently, nor did the fact that 



106 Summertime 

I didn't need a job or anything else to do. I look back on the 
whole thing with some astonishment. 

Perhaps it is easily explained by the fact that, when I grew 
up, people were always offering you jobs, and you were ex- 
pected to take them whether you wanted them or not (most 
often you did not, since these jobs always got in the way of 
going to the beach or something else important) — and you 
did. Still, it's interesting to see that I didn't think my utter 
lack of knowledge any particular handicap, nor my lack of 
any "teaching skills" and even less interest in any such thing. 
I wasn't, by the way, a total idiot in every way. It wouldn't 
have occurred to me, say, to stand up and play Haydn's Oboe 
Concerto in public, since I knew I didn't play well enough 
to do so then. Indeed, the first orchestra I played with, a small 
church group, wouldn't let me play at all, for fear of the dis- 
tressing noises I occasionally made. I could rehearse with 
them, but in public I was just to sit there and look as though 
I was playing . . . the fact remains, I had no sense of the fact 
that I was proposing to stand up and talk to an audience for 
an hour on a subject about which I knew nothing. 

I can only figure now that this bravery — or idiocy, or 
both — must have been the result of my experience as a stu- 
dent. 

It was not totally true that I was an unserious student. We 
all read a lot, and certainly discussed what we read, plenty. 
It just always seemed to be that whatever I was reading, my 
classes were about something else I was not reading. If I was 
reading Lawrence, the class would be about Dryden. If I was 
reading Lenin, the class would be about Max Weber. I knew, 
from experience, that you could get through the class re- 
spectably without changing your reading habits at all, that is, 
without really knowing anything about it. 

Accordingly, I went down to the Amerika Haus library 
and crammed just as I would have done had I been a student 
of art history facing a final. I looked at the textbook and the 
previous teacher's notes, saw where the class was, and went, 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 107 

the first night, armed with what seemed to me plenty of dope 
about Romanesque architecture, a word I had never heard 
of before. I also bought quite a few picture postcards of 
Romanesque churches to show — I mean, if the card said 
Romanesque, I had it. 

Unfortunately, the moment I stood to address the class (in 
my experience, professors and teachers stood), I was struck 
down with stage fright. I had planned to read some from 
the text, but shook so violently that it was impossible. I had 
a neat little lecture all memorized, to be accompanied by the 
showing of my postcards, but could not hold on to the cards 
and had to get a young captain, actually my boss in the day- 
time, to hold them up. My lecture lasted not a half hour, but 
about ten minutes. I was out of gas. I recall apologizing. I 
was a little nervous — a little? my boss said to me the next 
day — assigned some pages to read and fled. 

I had been in school all my life and just knew, almost un- 
consciously, what teachers did, that is, how they behaved 
while they taught. I had not planned on the stage fright. In 
the end, the class came out all right, I think. I talked with 
my boss and with the guy who'd offered me the job — actually 
I planned to quit — and began to get it about what was 
wanted in this class. The students were all officers and/or 
officers' wives, and what they wanted from the course was a 
little Kultur. I was in much the same boat. All of us had 
lived our lives in America within range of art museums, but 
had never entered them. Now, in Europe, we all went all the 
time, wherever we traveled, to museums, to cathedrals, and 
we wanted to know something about what we were looking 
at. We wanted to be able to say, this is Gothic, this Roman- 
esque, and how come it is, this picture looks like Breughel 
. . . nothing wrong with that, and once we got it straight, it 
worked OK. I collected more postcards, we drummed up an 
opaque projector, I read about the cards in the text and, 
while I never actually got over shaking, I could get the cards 
in the projector. These officers and their wives went some- 



108 Summertime 

where every weekend, and they too brought back postcards 
and talked about them, what and when this was built, 
painted, by whom, taking over the class, which had now be- 
come something like a travel bureau or guide — go here to 
see this, there to see that, if you go to this town you'll see a 
fine example of this or that. 

The class became something of a pleasure. After all, these 
officers and their wives were not crazy. They didn't want to 
go to school, for God's sake — just wanted to know some- 
thing. Once I got over having to be a teacher, we were OK. 
I ended up with a fine postcard collection, and knew, in the 
end, quite a lot about what was to be seen in towns from 
Vienna to London, Amsterdam to Rome, and villages in be- 
tween, although, in an odd turnabout, it was the students, 
not the professor, who went to all these places, since I was at 
once too broke and too busy to go running all over Europe. 

It's only now, in summertime, that I think about it, and 
about my other teaching job the following year. What I 
want to say, I guess, is that I was very serious in those days 
about a number of things. I was serious about playing my 
horn, serious about improving my German and reading Ger- 
man literature, serious about learning something about Euro- 
pean politics from the German university students at the 
cave, but I wasn't serious about schoolteaching, any more 
than I was about my job as a postal clerk. 

I had never known anyone who was planning to be a 
teacher, no one who had ever taken an education course, and 
no thought about schools had ever entered my mind. 

Had it, I think I would have seen the town of Heidelberg 
itself as a Good School. 



CHAPTER 



11 



Good Schools 

"How much does the Empire State Building 
weigh?" Buckminster Fuller once asked a con- 
vention of architects in New York City. 



I spent the summers of 1973, 1974, and 1975 at Mercer Uni- 
versity, in Macon, Georgia. 

American public schools were a source of discontent then, 
as now. Scholars and teachers and much of the public be- 
lieved that the schools just weren't producing much in the 
way of serious learning — real learning — and that they had 
little respect for the intellect. 

Of course, the reasons we gave for this lack were different 
then. The schools, those summers, were too rigid, too au- 
thoritarian, too bound up in rote memorization of isolated 
facts, too concerned with test scores, too disciplined; they 
were, most of all, "irrelevant" to the lives of the students of 
whatever age. In a word, they promoted ignorance and 
superstition, rather than combatted them. 

109 



110 Good Schools 

Vietnam and the civil rights movement, counterculture — 
those had been the passwords. We had sought alternatives . . . 
to what? Well, to everything, in the end, but especially to 
the mind-numbing public school classrooms. 

The only similarity to the present outcry was that then, as 
now, the teachers were to blame. 

Mercer seemed to be an unlikely place for such a gathering 
as took place there those summers. A young education pro- 
fessor (and former power-lifting champion of the world) 
named Terry Todd got together one of the wilder collections 
of summer-school teachers and speakers yet seen under one 
roof. Besides well-known educators like Edgar Z. Frieden- 
berg, John Holt, and Peter Marin, we had the farmer/poet 
Wendell Berry, Canadian free-schoolers, professors of Chris- 
tian Ethics, blind folksingers, feminists, black school admin- 
istrators from New York City, filmmakers, San Francisco 
poets, ex-linebackers for Texas football teams, behavior 
modificationists, musicians, and wild, tough veterans of 
southern civil rights and poverty programs, mostly ex-Baptist 
preachers under the mantle of the Committee for Southern 
Churchmen led by the redoubtable Will Campbell. "It got 
so," said Friedenberg, "I often thought that the speaker after 
me might come out wrassling an alligator." 

All this at a small, private, conservative Baptist university 
in Macon, put together by the sheer willpower of Todd and 
the local power and political savvy of Joe Hendricks, another 
member of the Southern Churchmen and, then, assistant to 
the president of the university. Macon was a town where 
the mayor drove around in an army-surplus tank, which he 
later traded in for a navy patrol boat to cruise the Ocmulgee 
River in, guarding, in both instances, against revolution. The 
students were almost all regular Georgia public-school 
teachers, coming to the university as teachers will in summer- 
time, to earn academic credits for promotion and salary. 
Some seemed pleased with one part of the show, some with 
another, some no doubt by none of it. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 1 1 1 

For me, it was a little Golden Age, but, as that age mostly 
involved coming to know people on the Mercer faculty who 
became lifelong comrades, the details can be left out. What 
is certainly true is that none of us had the slightest idea what 
to do about schools. 

Well, not anymore. The "school movement" had been go- 
ing on for quite a few years. Most of us there had been 
around free schools and alternative schools or taught delin- 
quents to write poems in the park, taught drama in the jails 
of Canada, had run our own experimental schools in the 
public school system, or had established college classes with- 
out grades — professors at Mercer itself had a going, model 
Independent Freshman Program in which students designed 
their own programs and got credit for working in schools or 
mental hospitals, and Joe brought in genuine murderesses 
from nearby Milledgeville Prison to study on campus. 

We had all done this stuff by the book, or at least by our 
books. 

Our position was similar to that of a San Francisco State 
College professor who had convinced me of a number of 
progressive notions when I was getting my credentials, long 
ago (and perhaps caused me more trouble than I needed). I 
saw him on that campus, some years later during the riots 
there, shepherding a large group of Upward Bound minority 
high school kids through the college library. He was doing 
right, but he was not happy. The Upward Bound kids lived 
in college dormitories for the summer and were a source of 
unending trouble, he said. They were noisy, stole, broke into 
the Coke machines, and so on. I could see that, I told him, 
from the way they were roaming the library, pulling out card 
catalogues at random, laughing, yelling, spilling out the 
cards — if the idea was that making a leap with these minority 
ne'er-do-wells was going to imbue them with a love of learn- 
ing, it wasn't working yet. Right, he said. I told my other 
education students just today that although my ideas are cor- 
rect, they don't work! 



112 Good Schools 

That was more or less our experience, and our position. 
A letter from Todd to Friedenberg, published in Katallagete, 
the journal of the Southern Churchmen, sometime before 
these meetings, had made the point. Todd spoke of teaching 
at Auburn, not long before, doing right, being relevant, not 
grading, and so on, and had been pleased to hear from his 
students that they all thought his class the best they'd ever 
had, they'd all learned more than ever before, and it was an 
inspiration. He had been really excited, he wrote, until it 
came up one day, according to some schedule, that he could 
give the class a choice of going on learning all this wondrous 
stuff, or of having the day off. The class voted unanimously 
to have the day off. 

That had shocked Todd a bit. My God! he thought to him- 
self. Here we're having, by the students' own testimony, this 
wonderful educational experience, but they'd rather have 
the day off. He had wondered if Edgar could explain it. 

Friedenberg had had much the same trouble. He had be- 
gun to teach, at Dalhousie University in Halifax, without 
giving grades, a fact accomplished, being as it was in Canada, 
with a good deal of personal struggle. Everyone was against 
it, especially the students, who thought that whoever worked 
ought to get better grades than whoever didn't. Edgar perse- 
vered though, perhaps telling the students they might like 
to learn for the sake of learning, rather than for grades. He 
got through the year, but the next year, his class swelled 
from thirty students or so to four hundred or so. Word had 
gotten around. Edgar's main insight was that he was getting 
ripped off. 

By the summer of 1975, of course, even Todd could see 
that if he'd had any sense, he'd rather have had the day off 
too. Tom, purportedly a dean at Mercer, had hoped that the 
students, left to plan their own programs, would choose to 
read Plato and talk to him, Tom, about it. Tom, personally, 
thought a lot of Plato. Now he had begun to think, well. Ell 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 113 

just have to start again making these rascals read Plato. Tom 
wanted the rascals to read Plato. 

Ted, a professor of something there at Mercer, had never 
thought that anything would work with the human race, but 
he liked very much the variety of the new programs, the fun, 
the talk, those murderesses and all, and, especially, that those 
programs seemed to be antiadministration, which afforded 
him pleasure, or so I think. 

Everything we had thought of, and everything we had 
done, was right. Only it hadn't worked. 

What was it that hadn't worked? 

Well, the students had not all become scholars. 

Was that what we had wanted? Was that the point of good 
schools, that everyone should read Plato? 

We had begun to see that we had betrayed ourselves. We 
had all begun by arguing that the public school view of 
learning, of the intellect, was too narrow, bordered on the 
superstitious, and was oppressive. Our disappointment at how 
things had worked out seemed to mean that our ends had 
been, all along, just about the same. We hadn't been smart 
enough to ask ourselves, or the schools, some outrageous 
questions, like How much do schools weigh? in order to 
keep our own minds alert and wary. 

As a cure, I, at least, tried to think of some good schools 
where things worked out just about right. 



CHAPTER 



-12 

Spring Training 



I had a problem one spring, long ago, and solved it by creat- 
ing a Good School. 

Jay, my oldest son, was about nine, I think. He was re- 
covering (if that's the right word) from encephalitis — or what 
the doctors guessed was encephalitis, since it wasn't anything 
else they could see — anyway, he'd progressed in a few years 
from not being able to move at all, just swallow and breathe, 
to crawling around and then tottering around standing up, to 
being able to run around a bit before falling down. What he 
wanted to do, above all, was to play baseball. 

I thought that this was a good idea, to play a little ball, but 
the odds of doing so seemed against us. We lived about two 
blocks away from Helen Wills Playground, which had two 
asphalted ball fields, like all city playgrounds, so that was 
fine. What we didn't have was someone to play baseball with. 
Jay didn't want to just play catch, and couldn't at that time 
catch anyway. He wanted to play baseball — play a game! Hit, 
run, score, win or lose. 



114 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 115 

We had Jay, Jack, my younger son, about five, and me. 
Well, Jack would play. He Avould, at that time, do anything 
in order to be with his big brother. He seemed puzzled, I 
thought, about why his big brother fell down all the time, 
although he himself was only a year or so from falling down 
all the time too, but of course for a different reason. Still, Jay 
was a lot bigger and had muscles like iron from all the push- 
ups and other exercises he'd had to do since he was six, and 
he was Jack's official big brother even if Jay couldn't always 
talk right, and, well, that seemed to be enough. 

Who to play with? There were plenty of kids playing ball 
down there at Helen Wills Playground, but they wouldn't 
do for us. They were eight, nine, ten . . . fourteen, but 
could play, and were out of our league. They would have 
been happy to play with us and slaughter us, but I couldn't 
have that. 

You can always do something. We lived on the down side 
of Russian Hill, actually on the other side of the hill from 
North Beach. It had formerly been an all-Italian neighbor- 
hood, but the Chinese were even then buying into it. All the 
Italians said they would not, no never, ever, sell out to the 
Chinamen, no way; but of course when the Chinamen showed 
up offering cash money, they in fact did sell out and moved 
out to Tierra Firma, on the outskirts of town. Right where I 
worked and still work. 

We were surrounded by Chinese families. All the Chinese 
adults, in those days, worked at least twenty-four hours a day. 
Our landlords did the same. We lived in this nice, old Rus- 
sian Hill flat, six big rooms, paying ninety dollars a month, 
and over us the Chinese landlord and his family lived. The 
father was an engineer for the city. His Avife ran a beauty 
shop in North Beach. Their two daughters went to U.C. 
Berkeley, studying, even then, engineering. After the father 
was done with his engineering job for the city, after the wife 
was done with her beauty parlor, after the girls were done 
with Berkeley, they all went down and attended to their 



116 Spring Training 

laundromat. So they all got home about 11:00 at night and 
did then just what everyone else does in the morning, noon, 
or afternoon: they cleaned the house, vacuumed, made the 
beds, cooked dinner, did whatever they did. The girls had 
piano lessons at 12:30 a.m. and practiced early in the morn- 
ing. I heard the first of Bach's "Two-Part Inventions" played, 
at 12:30 a.m., misplayed, started over again, bungled, and 
started over again, every morning. 

So it came about that as I struggled with this problem of 
our ball team, as I went out on Saturday morning and looked 
around the streets hoping that the streets would solve all 
this for me, I could see all these little Chinese kids sitting 
stolidly on the steps leading up to their flats, formerly oc- 
cupied by solid Italian families whose kids would have been 
out playing ball at Helen Wills Playground, no doubt. They 
were little kids; they ran from about four to perhaps ten. 
Boys and girls. They had been instructed by their fathers to 
sit there on the steps and not to move until the father or 
mother came home, some twenty hours later. They did so. 

It took a day or two of seeing this, I guess, but I would 
now say that I saw immediately that these little kids were 
our ball club. I began to speak to them. I began to say, look, 
tell your father that we want to go down to Helen Wills 
Playground. I said, I'll look after you and bring you home, 
back to sit on the steps. I said. We'll play baseball! I was not 
confident that they understood. 

I talked to our landlord about it, probably some day about 
12:30 A.M. and he knew Jay and perhaps got it over to the 
Chinese kids' parents. However it was, one Saturday some 
ten or so of these kids left their stoops and gathered in our 
alley where we had a little batting and catching practice be- 
fore heading out to Helen Wills Playground, marching down 
the two blocks and holding hands across the Broadway inter- 
section. 

We played work-up. There were three batters, one of whom 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 1 1 7 

had to catch. When a batter was out, everyone moved up one 
position — right field to center, center to left, left to shortstop 
and so on (the out batter moved to right) so that eventually 
everyone got to hit. After everyone had hit, the game was 
over. How long that would be was up to me. I was, of course, 
the pitcher throughout the game. I was also umpire, manager. 
Owner of the Club, Commissioner of Baseball, and fan. It 
was a perfect position for any teacher to be in, and one of 
the reasons that it was a Good School. 

It was also my job to keep the game going, keep the Chi- 
nese kids from being discouraged and heading back to their 
stoops. I keyed in, the first outing, on Jay. 

Jay was bigger and taller than anyone else, and looked like 
a champ. After staggering up to the plate and tottering 
around a bit, he would get into his batting stance and stand 
there, solid as a rock, yelling at me to fire it in there. He had 
a perfect swing; level, even, elbows in, head up — he told me 
confidentially that he had copied his swing from Willie Mc- 
Covey. 

In truth, I thought his swing was just like McCovey's. But 
its defect was that it had nothing to do with where the ball 
was; Jay swung the bat at the same level all the time. If the 
ball happened to hit the bat, if it was pitched exactly in the 
place where he swung, then pow! away it went. 

Zeroing in on Jay, I began to understand how to gerry- 
mander the game. I decided, for example, that Jay should 
mostly hit, otherwise he'd end up in the outfield or (good 
Lord!) on first base, where he would get killed by a hit or 
thrown ball. After he hit, though, there was another problem. 
He would tear down to first base, covered by a seven-year-old 
Chinese kid who immediately headed out of the way for fear 
of being run over by Jay, who then, experienced major- 
leaguer that he was, had to make the turn around first base. 
He invariably fell flat on his ass. It then took him a long 
time to get up and totter back to first, so by that time three 



1 1 8 Spring Training 

or four Chinese kids in the outfield would have captured the 
ball and thrown it back somewhere and someone would get 
it and run toward first base to tag old Jay out! 

I tried to talk Jay into just running past the base, slowing 
down, and taking his time getting back; "Don't make the 
turn," I'd advise him, "and then you're safe!" 

He would tell me then that he had to make the turn in 
order to stretch his hit into a double, if possible. I cursed my- 
self for having provided, at ball games or watching them on 
TV, this expertise. Moreover, it was obvious that with our 
fielders he could have stretched any hit into a home run, sup- 
posing he didn't have to fall down rounding every base mak- 
ing the goddamn turns. 

You want to hit, I told him, and if these kids tag you out, 
then you can't hit! 

When I fall down, he told me, then you call time out! 

Once I got the idea, we had good ball games, lasting about 
two hours. I became, at long last, a great pitcher; I could hit 
the kids' bats as they swung, or not, as I chose. I could put 
them out or not. I could see which Chinese girls could 
catch — and let them make the putout — which kids couldn't, 
and make the putout myself when it was time for someone 
to be put out. I could even, finally, put out, or let Jay be put 
out, and let him take his position in right field, run down a 
ball, and throw it a long way, somewhere. Jack, at five and a 
half not being a professional ballplayer like Jay, could choke 
up, he said, on the bat, which was as big as he was, and hit 
it no matter where I threw it (not having copied Willie 
McCovey) and could catch besides, so I could let myself put 
him out from time to time and let him play first or right. 

We played every Saturday, all spring. Who knows what 
major effect this game may have had on the structure of 
Western civilization? 

After each game it became clear that we needed Popsicles. 
There was an Arab store right up the block from Helen Wills 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 119 

Playground, and we would all gather round after someone 
made the last out and begin to discuss Popsicles. I was buy- 
ing, as befitted the Commissar of Baseball, so that wasn't a 
problem; who would go get them, and what kind, was the 
problem. During the first games, kids argued about who got 
to go get the Popsicles and we had to flip endless coins which 
took half an hour. Looking back, and with all my experience 
now as a classroom teacher, I realize that the kids knew that 
whoever got to go get them would be assured of getting one, 
and of getting the kind they wanted, in case there was some 
mistake about how many, or even in case someone was to be 
intentionally left out. How did they know? I might be 
crazy . . . 

By the end of our spring season, every kid knew there 
would be Popsicles enough, and no one wanted to trudge up 
one-half block to the Arab store and haul them back. It 
wasn't the work so much as that the job had become declasse. 
Whoever went up was a chump and/or a flunky. Major- 
leaguers, even Chinese major-leaguers, didn't run errands. 
Major-leaguers wanted to sit around at Helen Wills Play- 
ground at the end of the game and brag. / hit! they planned 
to say. I catch! they would tell each other, while someone 
else brought them orange, lime, or grape Popsicles, according 
to their wishes, and their due. 

In the end, I couldn't get anyone to go. Both Jack and Jay 
denied that they even wanted Popsicles. The Chinese kids, 
all of a sudden, didn't understand English. I was not equipped 
to say OK, No Popsicles at all. So I went up to the Arab my- 
self. Well, I got even by buying a beer from the Arab and 
drinking it all by myself on the way back. 

One problem was never solved in this Good School. There 
was this little wart of a kid. Win was his name (probably Wn, 
actually), and old Win, at perhaps seven, was playing on the 
team and lived three houses up from me. Win, like Jack, al- 
ways hit the ball, no matter where I pitched it. That was OK, 
in terms of this ball game. Normally, I'd either field it and 



1 20 Spring Training 

put him out at first, or field it, bumble it, let him be safe at 
first, or let it go past me and let the in-or-outfielders fool 
around with it, just like a real ball game. 

But Win never bothered about what I did, or the infielders 
did, or the outfielders did. From the first game on, he hit — 
and then he ran to first, ran to second, safe or out, didn't mat- 
ter to Win, and then kept right on going past second out 
through center field and out the gate of Helen Wills Play- 
ground and back to his home to sit on the stoop, and would 
never be seen or heard of again until next Saturday! 

After the first game, I tried to explain to Win. OK, he said. 
Then he hit the ball, ran around first, ran through second 
and headed out the gate, and was never seen or heard of 
again until next Saturday, where he showed up, hit, and did 
the same thing. 

I tried, in subsequent games, to strike old Win out just in 
order to keep him around, but couldn't do it. Wherever I 
pitched it, he hit it — maybe only a foot or two, maybe even 
just fouled it off. It was good enough for Win, and off he 
went. 

On this last day, however, when I had to go and get the 
orange and lime and grape Popsicles, I kept one, and when 
we went back I went over to Win, sitting upon the stoop 
there, three houses away from mine, and gave him a lime 
Popsicle. That was the first time he'd ever gotten one, given 
his odd proclivity. 

Win, I said. Next time you get to second base, just stay 
there. It'll be OK. 

OK, he said. 



CHAPTER 



13 



Brim 



One day near the end of our third summer at Mercer Uni- 
versity, Arpine — who had been the reading teacher in our 
old alternative school-within-a-school at Spanish Main — and 
I received an invitation to come by Naropa Institute in 
Boulder on our way back home, and we agreed to do so 
happily. 

On the way there, we stopped in Berea, Kentucky, to see 
our old comrade Jim Holloway, then professor of Christian 
Ethics at that university. We got out to his house in a little 
"holler." One thing clear about all southern professors is 
that they never live in town, but always out in some "holler," 
and, if possible, by some creek, and they all have forty acres 
or so. We sat up and talked and drank some and went to bed 
very late and in the morning Holloway had a little school 
set up for us. 

We didn't know it at the time, of course. Next morning 
Holloway wanted to know if perhaps we would want to go 

121 



122 Brim 

a-fishing. As it just happened, he had a little pond down there 
full of fish, which needed to be fished, and maybe we'd . . . 
well, he had me, and so down we went in the mornino-. The 
pond was to be full of bass and crappie (called bream; pro- 
nounced "brim" in the South), and so I began casting out a 
lure into this little pond, planning to show Arpine that I 
knew all about fishing for bass and brim, but, of course, old 
Holloway had to butt in and tell me I wasn't doing it right 
and wonder where in the world I learned to fish and show 
me the right way — we did that for a bit. Shortly, I caught a 
little bass, and then Arpine cast and caught a bass, and so 
Holloway left. 

We figured that was it for the day. We'd fish some, catch 
enough for dinner, and stop, be alone, then, talk, rest, nap, 
and so on. Fifteen minutes after we had demonstrated to 
Holloway that we at last knew what we were doing, and 
would do it, and were looking forward to doing it for a while, 
Patrick appeared. 

Patrick was six years old; HoUoway's son. 

We entered a school immediately — it doesn't mean we 
were terribly pleased with that entrance, but we knew it and 
obeyed. Holloway had sent Patrick down to learn, from us, 
how to fish, and presumably, and much more important, that 
it was a good thing to do in yore spare time. 

Well, we thought, it's HoUoway's pond, his brim and bass, 
and his son. How come he needs us to instruct this kid? He 
didn't mind instructing us, did he? He knew how to fish the 
pond. 

The point is, he knew everything — I believe you could say 
that about Holloway — but did not want to instruct his own 
kid in it, and therefore required a school. He was right. He 
knew that a school is a thing where your kid will be taught 
something which you could, of course, teach him yourself, if 
need be, but which you would rather someone else did. That's 
it about schools. What they are for. 

In fact, since it was a fishing school, and since the bass and 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 123 

brim in the pond were reasonably willing, we had a pleasant 
morning. Patrick was an eager, sensitive student, only oc- 
casionally throwing rocks into the pond when the bites 
slackened. We caught enough fish for dinner and took them 
back to clean them, leaving Patrick, now accomplished, cast- 
ing and throwing rocks into the pond. School was out for 
him. 

Not entirely so, however, for us. Holloway came out to 
observe me cleaning the fish. I had learned to clean bass and 
crappie from my father, by the lakes of California, and had 
even, for a time, cleaned most of the fish we caught. I'll 
handle them, I would boldly say, while my father wondered 
aloud if I really thought I could, being a smart teacher him- 
self. The image of being left alone with the sharp, sliver-thin 
cleaning knife, shoulder to shoulder with other fish-cleaning 
fishermen, talking about where you got this one, what lure 
pulled in that one . . . worked on me for quite a few years. 

Times had changed. Now it was a chore. In any case. Hollo- 
way didn't watch long. He wanted to know where to God I 
learned to clean fish. I was too slick for Holloway, though, 
and wondered if he'd care to show me how he thought it 
ought to be done. He had to do it, of course, so I stood by 
with one of his beers observing his technique, admiring it, 
until Holloway got the notion and said he thought he could, 
after all, find another knife for me, if I wanted to help. 

Arpine, in the meantime, had gone in to discuss cooking 
the fish with Holloway's wife, Nancy. Arpine wanted to 
saute them just a bit in butter. Nancy thought that would be 
nice, but commented that Holloway would have a fit. They 
did it anyway, and Holloway came in and had a fit. He 
wanted those bass and brim deep-fried in egg and cornmeal 
and that was that. In the end, they cooked some one way, 
and some the other. Holloway didn't even glance at those 
sauteed in butter. I ate some of both. 

So that was a Good School, if brief. 



CHAPTER 



14 



Naropa 



We knew very little about Naropa, or what we were to do 
there. We knew it was some sort of Buddhist encampment. 
We knew that John Perks, a British guy who wrote me, was 
running some sort of summer school there at Boulder. We 
knew, because he said so, that Gregory Bateson would be 
there, and that is principally why we went, since Bateson was 
one of our heroes, although, talking about him on the air- 
plane, we couldn't quite state why. 

Oh, boy! What a school! Naropa appeared to be run by 
Chogyam Trungpa, a fugitive lama — in fact, by this time 
much of Boulder appeared to be run by him. Perks worked 
for him as a kind of majordomo. Trungpa was referred to as 
Rinpoche; we understood it to mean "enlightened." Bateson 
had apparently known and admired Rinpoche for some time. 
We were strangers to all this; we knew nothing about Bud- 
dhism, really, and certainly nothing of Naropa. 

We ended up in a large, fancy sorority house, where school 

124 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 125 

was to go on, and the students and teachers housed. And what 
students! They were all, to my astonishment, young Ph.D.'s, 
mostly from the social sciences — anthropologists, psycholo- 
gists, sociologists, all very successful, having done fieldwork 
in Africa, India, Ethiopia, and parts unknown, and published 
the results of their work, making it. What in hell were they 
doing back in school? They were the most successful, making- 
it lot I had ever seen in any school. 

What a school! We sat there that first afternoon, Arpine 
and I, Perks, and Bateson, on the patio of this fairy-tale 
house, eating oysters, while the student Ph.D.'s stood inside 
pressing their noses against the window glass. These Ph.D.'s 
were not allowed to approach us. The difference between 
teachers and students was being made clear. Teachers ate 
oysters, or whatever Bateson, in fact, wanted. Students, eat 
whatever you can; we teachers are not interested in your 
problems. 

I wondered some about our role in this school. Officially, 
it was the Educational Module of the Naropa Summer School. 
No one inquired of Arpine about the mysteries of teaching 
reading; no one asked me about discipline problems in the 
seventh grade. Perks had apparently read one of my books 
and liked it and thought I would be someone he'd like to talk 
to, a thought which turned out to be true. He told me about 
his life and Rinpoche's life and Buddhism and Gregory 
Bateson, and about the school he'd run once upon a time. 
He told me that, in order for things to look right (he was 
paying me out of Naropa educational money) I ought to give 
a lecture officially, and I did, but I thought it was a failure, 
mercifully very brief. No one was interested in the plight or 
problems of the public schools. The Ph.D. students didn't 
care; they had handled schools quite well. Perks and Bateson 
openly stated that schools were probably OK as they were, 
however they were. Perks remembered being made to memo- 
rize poems like "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and 
thought that was as good a thing to do in school as any. 



126 Naropa 

Bateson agreed; they both thought that very few people 
learned anything anyway, that those who could learn would 
do so no matter what (an opinion Bateson was to repeat many 
times later on as a regent of the University of California), 
and so what the hell? Of course, neither one had ever at- 
tended any public schools, or not for very long. 

After that, I settled in as teacher with nothing to teach 
and so had quite a pleasant and interesting time. This was 
the best school for teachers that I ever saw. We ate kidneys 
with Perks and Bateson in the morning, oysters in the after- 
noon. Cocktails at 5:00. Dinner was communal; someone was 
to cook each day for the school. Gregory made very good ox- 
tail stew, ignoring the fact that most of the student Ph.D.'s 
were either vegetarians or aspiring vegetarians. We spent eve- 
nings listening to Denise Levertov, John Ashbery, and W. S. 
Merwin read publicly. We assembled with the rest to hear 
Rinpoche speak. This assemblage, not optional in the least, 
began at eight in the evening; Rinpoche always showed up 
at ten. We were told, upon wondering why the students fell 
for this every time, that students had indeed once gotten to- 
gether and all showed up at ten — Rinpoche was there wait- 
ing for them, having been there since eight, and had pre- 
scribed quite a few unpleasant Buddhist penances. The 
students were all dressed in early seventies Ph.D. -hippie-Bud- 
dhist style with beads and hair and sandals and the rest; 
Rinpoche always showed up in Brooks Brothers attire, usually 
an immaculate safari shirt with epaulettes, beautifully tailored 
shorts, and knee-length stockings. 

Well. We got the idea, somewhere along the line, that the 
students had become dissatisfied with their successful Ph.D. 
lives and, already having been through Freudian, Jungian, 
Gestalt, and nondirective analyses, having been to Esalen, 
having been rolfed and everything else they could think of or 
that had been suggested to them as The Way, they wanted to 
become Buddhists. Like all students they wanted every- 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 127 

thing — they wanted to remain Ph.D.'s, but they also wanted to 
be happy. 

Gregory Bateson took over their instruction. 

We went down with them to the creek. There they got 
pails of creek water, brought it back, and put it into an 
aquarium. Then we all walked down to a large vacant lot, 
surrounded by parking lots, where Bateson pointed out the 
existence of prairie dogs. He gave instructions; they were 
each to spend six hours daily lying flat on the ground observ- 
ing the prairie dogs. They were to write down everything 
they saw. It was over 100 degrees outside; there was no shade. 
After that, they were to come back and spend any free time 
they had looking into the aquarium water with Bateson's 
magnifying glass, and were to write down and draw every- 
thing they saw. That was it. 

Nothing was said about what to do with these notes and 
drawings. The rest of the time they were free to "sit" (the 
Naropa term for meditation) or make love, as Perks strongly 
suggested they do, or learn to play poker or shoot dice with 
me in the evenings. Perks thought me perfectly suited for this 
kind of instruction (the only error I thought he made) and 
bought a bottle of bourbon whiskey (with school funds) 
which he apparently thought appropriate for this subject. I 
became the target of Ph.D.'s trying to do what they were told, 
shooting dice and crying out, "Little Joe!" and "Nina from 
Pasadena!" if they were trying to get four or nine. 

Bateson gave a lecture, talking for about two hours to the 
effect, I think, that the world went to hell with the invention 
of language, which had separated humans from the rest of 
the universe and was an altogether bad thing. He wanted to 
discuss how to get back to that primal state. We all sat, fasci- 
nated; we understood very little, I believe — still, we were 
fascinated. A guy talking about getting rid of talking by 
talking . . . 

Perks gave a lecture and slide show about his own experi- 



128 Naropa 

mental school, apparently a few years back, one supported 
by some sort of state funding in New York. Perks had, he 
said, spent most of the funds for longboats, eighteenth- 
century uniforms, and a cannon; he showed slides of the stu- 
dents cruising the river and the coast in these boats, firing off 
the cannon, led by Perks himself in the role of Captain Horn- 
blower. I felt a terrible pang, seeing this — why couldn't I 
have known Perks when alternative schools were the rage? 
Perks was clearly the real thing . , . 

That was it. It was an entirely different aspect of the Good 
School. 

Arpine was actually interested in the prairie dogs and in 
the aquarium water and often accompanied students to the 
vacant lot and gazed through the magnifying glass. Being on 
the staff, though, she could quit whenever she wanted. I made 
a little money off the dice-shooting students, had a fine time 
eating oysters and kidneys, and was very happy listening to 
Bateson, Perks, and the poets. (Bateson, it ought to be said, 
was ill at the time, but he was always extremely kind and 
gracious to the students once they had done their chores. He 
met them, talked with them, listened — gave his time con- 
stantly. He only refused to tell them what they were doing.) 

The students? I guess the virtue of the place for them was 
that they were doing as they were told — nothing unusual in 
itself for students who have become Ph.D.'s! — but doing it 
either for no reason at all, or for some reason they couldn't 
understand, or for no apparent benefit to themselves. That 
must have been new to them, and seemed to suffice. After all, 
they had come to the end of the line, somehow, an end con- 
sidered to be wonderful by all schools of my acquaintance up 
until then, but which had not contented them and which was 
currently seen to be worthless. 

When we left. Perks told me that Rinpoche was going to 
make a trip out to the West Coast soon and then Perks and I 
could go salmon fishing. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 129 

Perks was eager to fish and said he thought he could get a 
dispensation from Rinpoche which would allow him to do 
that, if I would guarantee to bait his hook for him and re- 
move any fish he caught from his hook. Just so he did not 
touch the killing instrument^ he said. 

I had a brief vision of Perks and Holloway, down at Hollo- 
way's pond, and wondered if that would be a Good School 
or not. 



CHAPTER 



15 



Black Mountain 



I left Berkeley, one summer while I was still an undergradu- 
ate, to go to the famous Black Mountain college in North 
Carolina. I was twenty-two or twenty-three, just a boy, and 
had just begun to know everything. 

I did not know much about its fame then, but I was 
friends with two painters who had been there and who were 
going back. The reason I went was because some older 
painter, from Chicago, had a house down on the Yucatan 
Peninsula and we were all going to meet up with this guy 
in Black Mountain and go down there to live. They had pic- 
tures of the house to prove it — it was wonderful. Right on a 
beautiful beach, palm trees, jungly — I don't know about 
them, but I had a hundred dollars and I planned to go down 
there and never come back. 

Well, the deal fell through. The painter from Chicago had 
been offered a one-man show and couldn't make it and per- 
haps had decided to rent out the place instead, or it really 

130 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 131 

wasn't his; and one of the painters I knew was offered a job 
teaching at Black Mountain that summer. I was very angry, 
and so, although I stayed at Black Mountain all summer, I 
continued to resent it and resist its charms. 

Black Mountain had two heroes in residence that summer. 
One was the poet, Charles Olson. He was a huge man, and 
perhaps a little domineering, or perhaps it was my own re- 
sentment at fate which led me to avoid him. 

The other was Buckminster Fuller. We heard the story 
when we arrived. Fuller had engaged the students in build- 
ing his geodesic dome, a common enough term now, but not 
then. Indeed, it was supposed to have been the first one ever 
constructed, outside of tiny models. Fuller had told the stu- 
dents that the dome, some sixteen feet in diameter, was an 
antigravity machine. They were going to put it together, he 
said, and then some twenty of them were going to pick it up, 
lift it about a foot into the air, and the dome was going to 
stay there, held off the ground by the energy structure of 
those triangles, or something. 

They did it, but naturally, the dome just fell back to earth, 
where it still stood. 

That story suited my mood, and I sneered at the gullible 
Black Mountain students. 

When Fuller left, a few days later, I scoffed even more 
openly. He was trying to pack his stuff into a small trailer. 
Fuller had made a number of models of this and that, all of 
them from Ping-Pong balls attached together by wooden rods, 
in a great variety of shapes and forms. Every time Fuller got 
the trailer packed, he would look around and one or two of 
his Ping-Pong ball structures would be still left out, and 
wouldn't fit. After an hour or so of this. Fuller flew into a 
rage. There was quite a group of us sitting around in the 
grass watching him pack — mostly poets and painters who had 
become his architecture students, waiting to say good-bye and 
talking about what a genius he was. Fuller stopped his pack- 
ing and gave us a sermon. He had brought all these Ping- 



132 Black Mountain 

Pong balls and wooden rods down here in this trailer and 
they were, by God, going back in this trailer! He cursed the 
inventor of trailers for having made them in this stupid, un- 
yielding shape! He reprimanded the rigid minds of men! He 
denounced the structure of the universe, which made trouble 
whenever he. Fuller, rearranged it in the slightest! 

In the end he stormed back into his house. His wife came 
out and packed up the trailer; perhaps she had to dismantle 
a few models in order to do so. After a bit Fuller came out 
too, and they drove off. 

This tantrum made me very happy, as you may imagine, 
because I could see I didn't have to worry about having been 
wrong about this silly joint. That made it a Good School. 

Of course, later on it became clear that even if the geodesic 
dome wasn't an antigravity machine, it had plenty of other 
virtues and its builder, Fuller himself, became famous. I had, 
certainly, to take back and even eat my sneering words — 
another facet of the Good School. 



CHAPTER 



16 



Gary and Alfred 

'Wo Good Deed Goes Unpunished." 



Back at Spanish Main School. One afternoon, just after school 
was out, Gary came into the teachers' room. As it happened, 
only Arpine, David, and I were still there. Perhaps we were 
talking about some outrage — that's what we usually talked 
about. Gary entered with that air he always has when he has 
something extraordinary to relate. He comes in, advances a 
step or two, and stands, waiting for us to give him our at- 
tention. 

We give it. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out some- 
thing, conceals it in his right hand. We wait. 

What would you guess this is? he asks us. Without waiting, 
he says, This is one thousand dollars! I just took it off Alfred 
Stone! 

Whoa! What? A thousand dollars? A grand! . . . 

Gary goes on to tell. Well, we all know Alfred, Arpine and 
I had him in the seventh grade, he reminds us. Sure we do. 

133 



134 Gary and Alfred 

Alfred is an eighth grader; he is troublesome and disruptive, 
all the time. Not mean, violent, or vicious. He's a nice kid, 
but troublesome. That's what drives us nuts. He won't con- 
form. He won't do his homework or classwork. He won't shut 
up. Won't come for detention for not shutting up. Arpine 
has to remind us that he is a good reader. It seems that every 
time we bring up some troublesome kid, Arpine tells us that 
he or she is a good reader. We don't want to hear it, in the 
face of that thousand-dollar roll, which Gary now shows us. 
He counts it for us — a roll in twenties and fifties. 

The main thing we know about Alfred is that he will steal 
anything not nailed down. He is famous for it. He is the 
original kid about whom teachers are always exclaiming. Why 
should he remain in school? Don't we have any standards at 
all? 

Gary goes on. Fm on lunch duty, he says, and I always just 
kind of keep an eye on Alfred anyway, just watch him roam 
around looking for something to steal, but now I see him 
over in a corner of the multiuse room surrounded by a bunch 
of kids, a big bunch of kids, which is unusual. I sidle over 
there. Usually when I come over, the group breaks up — 
whatever it is they were up to, they know I won't like it, so 
they just split. This time, they're too excited or interested 
to break up. They don't even notice me. When I get there, I 
see Alfred handing out money, bills, to every kid in sight! 
Now that's what you call unusual! 

Then they see me, of course, and all suddenly have busi- 
ness elsewhere. I confront Alfred. I discuss with him, briefly, 
about why he is giving out money. It's rather out of character, 
to say the least. In the end, I prevail on Alfred to pull out this 
roll — well, I have to threaten him just a bit — and here it is! 
One thousand bucks! And that's only what he had left! 

We all fall back. I told him, Gary says, to just keep cool 
and not say a thing, told him to go into my P.E. office after 
school and just stay there, while I figure out what to do. He's 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 135 

there now. I just looked in, being it's Alfred, and saw him. 
Stay put, I told him. He said he would. 

Well, hell, now, says Gary, we all know that Alfred is a 
cold crook, but he's supposed to be a minor-league crook, 
taking quarters that girls left in their desks, maybe conning 
or bullying a kid or two out of their lunch money, but a 
thousand dollars? Up until now we all had hope for him, 
right? He's a smart kid (Gary nods to Arpine), and we all 
plan to straighten him out, right? 

Its true. We do. 

But if he gets caught . . . wait, we all say, what do you 
mean, caught? You already caught him, Gary . . . 

But we know what Gary means. If we had been sympa- 
thetic to Alfred before, now we are unexplainably even more 
so. Possession of a grand will get Alfred right into the pokey. 
All of a sudden, none of us wants that to happen. 

Gary sits down then, and we discuss it. We don't know 
what to do, so at first we all jive around, splitting up the 
grand four ways among us, and telling Alfred to shut up or 
it's off to the jug. We know that we just ought to call the 
cops; we ought to just tell the principal, Dave, at this time, 
and let him handle it, call the cops, whatever. What is Alfred 
to us? 

Hell, we finally say, the thing to do is to talk to Alfred, find 
out where he got this dough, talk to whomever he got it from, 
and try to give it back without making a fuss. Talk the guy, 
whoever he is, into it, and then we'll have reformed Alfred! 
He'll recognize the seriousness, etc. . . . 

These three have since blamed me for having made this 
suggestion, but I deny it. 

We agree that Gary and David (who is, after all, a special 
ed. teacher, supposed to know how to counsel crazy kids) will 
go talk to Alfred now. That's what they do. 

They come back, triumphant. Alfred is still in the gym, 
for one thing; a good sign. So Alfred told Gary and David 



136 Gary and Alfred 

that he was just down, just before lunch (so cutting school, 
damn him!) at a little hamburger and coffee shop just off the 
shopping center — a block or so from the school. 

What for, Alfred? they asked him. Were you going to buy 
lunch there? No, just looking around, he told them. Then he 
just happened to see, on the counter, a gray bank bag which 
he, Albert, recognized as being the kind of bag which busi- 
nesses used to place their cash deposits into the bank. (We 
shuddered. We would not, we told each other, have recog- 
nized that.) 

Alfred said he figured someone from the coffee shop was 
to pick up this bag full of deposits and take it over to the 
bank, also only about a block away. So, on impulse, he just 
picked it up, took out the money, and, being the sort of nice 
guy he was, began giving out twenty-dollar bills to friends of 
his at lunchtime. 

Gary and David then said that they had talked old Alfred 
into giving the money back; he had supplied a partial list of 
friends to whom he had given twenty dollars. 

Gary and David had then, insanely, as they admitted later 
(after blaming me for the whole idea), decided that all they 
had to do was to find the bank bag, put the roll back in it, 
put it back on the counter of the coffee shop, and that would 
be it, fini, c'est tout! So? So Alfred had told them that he had 
run around the back of the coffee shop and took out the 
money and thrown the bank bag into a Dempster Dumpster, 
which stood at the back of the shop. 

We all forgot about the twenties Alfred had given away, in 
our urge to put everything right. It was decided that Gary, 
and Gary agreed, would go down with Alfred to the Dump- 
ster, find the bank bag, and we'd go from there. 

Gary went off to get Alfred. We, David, Arpine, and I, sat 
there, waiting. We talked about Alfred; we convinced our- 
selves that we were doing right. 

We talked about doing right for over an hour. Finally, 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 137 

Gary came back. He got our attention again. He was not 
pleased. 

You can all imagine, Gary said, just about how pleased I 
am to be rummaging around in garbage for an hour or so! 

He went on to tell us about it. 

Son of a bitch! he said. So we got there, we snuck back of 
the coffee shop. We're both guilty now, you got to see that. 
I hadn't figured on that, but of course we both are, Alfred's 
a crook and I begin to realize I'm abetting his ass. The whole 
thing is Jim's fault — he suggested it. 

Alfred had pointed out the correct garbage bin, the Dump- 
ster, and Gary found himself rummaging around in that bin. 
He noticed that Alfred stood to the side, not entering into 
the search at all. Alfred, so Gary said, didn't plan to rum- 
mage around in any garbage pail. He was above that. Gary 
couldn't see the bank bag. 

So finally, Gary said, outraged, mad as hell (how come I 
had to be doing this? he asked Heaven and so on, blaming all 
of us, especially me), so finally, I got in the motherfucking 
Dumpster! I got in it, climbed in this garbage, wallowed 
around in it, while Alfred is just leaning up against the 
fence, not participating at all, watching me wallow around — 
you know that if I could ever really hate anything, it's wal- 
lowing around in garbage! Alfred is not in here looking for 
the goddamn bank bag. He ain't doing shit! 

The bank bag isn't in there. I crawl out. I'm planning to 
kill Alfred. He's cool, insouciant . 

Alfred, Gary says he says, crawling out of the garbage bin, 
1 don't find the hank bag! 

Well, Mr. Riley, says Alfred, just leaning up against the 
fence, cool, perhaps I made a mistake. Perhaps I didn't really 
throw it in there. Maybe I even didn't find it, didn't even 
find the money, there. Not there, in that joint. Maybe. 

Gary is going crazy. Gary says he has decided that maybe 
we aren't going to reform Alfred. 



138 Gary and Alfred 

Jesus! We agree. Alfred may be out of our league, after 
all. Alfred has been sent home to his mama, so says Gary. 
Gary will not kill its, we hope and trust. We go in and tell 
Dave, the principal, still around at this late hour. He is not 
pleased with us. We have principals here! he says. We slink 
out, guilty, not knowing if we have principals or principles. 

The investigation is thus out of our hands. The principal 
will have to handle it. As time goes on, Gary does not get over 
it; your idea, he tells us, got me crawling around in that gar- 
bage can! 

All I know is, he says, that as long as I live I've got this 
image, this picture of myself crawling around in that garbage 
can like an idiot, looking for a bank bag that Alfred knows 
isn't there in the first place! Alfred knows it! 

In the end — well, it was never totally clear — Dave re- 
mained annoyed with us and we never quite got the full story. 
The owner of the cafe had not lost any bank deposits. It 
finally appeared that Alfred's mother, or his mother's boy 
friend, or both, had "picked up" the money from a furniture 
store in another town entirely and that Alfred had "found" 
it at home weeks later and brought the roll to school. Alfred 
himself was soon back being troublesome and a good reader. 
His mother seemed to have wiggled out of it. Those who 
suffered, besides Gary, seemed only to be a number of seventh 
and eighth graders who got in considerable trouble with their 
parents after the cops explained that the kids had received 
stolen goods and that the cops wanted the ten or twenty bucks 
back. Naturally, the kids had spent the money on candy or 
cigarettes or baseball caps — without telling their parents, and 
so they got grounded or beaten or both. Gary said that a 
number of them, understandably bitter, threatened to get 
together and beat Alfred up, but nothing ever came of it. 



CHAPTER 



17 



Some Fast Learners 



Before I left Heidelberg I had another teaching job. This 
job was in a small base in Schwetzingen, nearby, where the 
army had established a GED (general equivalency diploma) 
program. The army had decided that it was going to be a 
literate army; noncoms without high school educations/ 
diplomas were going to get them, or stop being noncoms. 
Experienced teacher that I was, I was hired to teach these 
noncoms in high school English, math, history, and science. 
We had class two days a week, two hours a day, for sixteen 
weeks, at the end of which all were to take the GED test. All 
did take it, all passed it, and all possessed forever after the 
equivalent of a high school diploma. 

The students were almost all sergeants, aged from twenty 
or so to fifty years old, most had left school before the sixth 
grade; all could, however, read and write reasonably well, 
and all wanted to continue being sergeants, rather than be 
busted back to PEG. 



139 



140 Some Fast Learners 

At the time, of course, I didn't think about it, but later 
on, when I did wonder why it was they all passed easily, that 
seemed to be it — they had some real reason to. When I 
thought about it, much later, I found it rather surprising 
that sixteen weeks, twice a week, had sufficed for these stu- 
dents to "learn" (pass a test about, anyway) material that 
schools found it necessary to give twelve years to, and even 
then many kid students found this material too difficult! 

The question is, of course, what was it that was surprising? 
That the army students passed it? That many kids don't after 
twelve years? Did it mean that if the kids didn't go to school 
at all until they were eighteen, then went for a few weeks 
with some reason to do it, that they would all pass? All be 
educated? Free of ignorance and superstition? 

Those kinds of questions plagued educators then (although 
not me) and plague them now, it seems. Since then, hun- 
dreds of studies and books and reports have been written to 
show that if kids don't go to school at all, they end up, on 
average, just about as educated as those that do. What no 
one can figure out is why my sergeants, had they actually 
gone to high school, would have been unable to pass the 
test, a fact that is almost 100 percent certain. It is probably 
this uncertainty — this worry — which causes all the swings of 
the pendulum that so concerned me earlier on in this book. 

One last note on the past; when I first took an actual teach- 
ing job, in a real, live public high school up in the moun- 
tains, in the gold country of California, I was supposed to 
teach art, along with English. That happened because they 
needed an art teacher, because they had art down as a subject 
in the curriculum, and here I came with History of Art at 
the University of Maryland on my resume! What could be 
better? But as it happened, even though I was no longer 
shaking with fright, my postcards and opaque projector cap- 
tivated no one. No students were traveling to the city to go 
to the museums. Romanesque versus Gothic arches could not 
be sold. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 141 

These real high school students wanted to paint and work 
in clay! Down I fled, once again, to Fine Arts in the city to 
see painters and craftsmen to find out the difi:erence between 
water colors and gouache, what kind of clay, what to do with 
it, what kind of paper to buy, how much paint, brushes . . . 



PART III 



Opening Day 



"Jaybirds are not Archangels!" the 
late poet Jack Spicer used to state. 
He usually meant, by that phrase, to 
deflate some overpompous demand 
or claim — say, that Art or the Social- 
ist party would save the world. 

Still, I always thought he meant, 
too, that if not Archangels, jaybirds 
were still jaybirds, thus not a bad 
thing to be at all, and did a good 
job of being jaybirds. 



CHAPTER 



-18 

Collective Bargaining 



But summertime has fled. 

I know it has, because the phone begins to ring. It rings 
about negotiations, about the budget and its "ending bal- 
ance," and about hiring and firing and transfers of adminis- 
trators and teachers. It seems as if none of this has been far 
from anyone's mind during summertime. 

Everything is fine at first. A caller tells me that the new 
board of trustees (hereinafter "board") has fired three prin- 
cipals and a few administrators. Sent them back to the class- 
room! On the recommendation of Dave, the superintendent! 

Another tells me that the board had an "ending balance" 
of over a half-million dollars. All right! That's our raise for 
next year, signed, sealed, and delivered! The new board is 
doing right! 

There are many more such pleased calls, especially about 
the administrators. It is nothing personal, in most cases. Well, 
in some cases it is. It is simply that we all, we teachers, feel 

145 



146 Collective Bargaining 

that the district has too many administrators, that they are 
not needed, don't do anything much, have too many assis- 
tants, too many secretaries, get in our way, make rules which 
hinder us, spend the money we need for supplies, and in the 
end ought to go back to the classroom and work. 

Many of us, I regret to say, worked in Tierra Firma twenty 
years ago. Then we had double the number of kids, double 
the number of teachers, but only one-quarter the number of 
administrators. The good old days! you can hear us saying. 
We add up the state and federal "programs" which over the 
years have added to the administration: ESAA (to cure us of 
racial prejudice) for which we got credits on our salary 
schedule for going to Chinese restaurants or listening to 
Spanish tunes, ESL, bilingual ed., Miller-Unruh reading, 
Title I or Chapter-This-and-That, Resource Programs for the 
lowest "percentile," the expansion of special ed. . . . each 
program with its own director and supervisor and assistant 
and secretary, all viewed with some suspicion. 

WPA for administrators! we cry, if we are old enough. 

I went to school as a kid not knowing a word of English! 
we cry if old enough and (in this town) Italian enough. 

And money! Our first year of negotiating we bargained 
for a 12 percent raise and a good three-year contract. A vic- 
tory for the union on our first shot at it! Well, next year just 
6 percent, but — a big but, a signed pledge by the board to 
put in more if they had any money left over. This was a new 
board, newly elected, going to right the many wrongs of the 
old board, and especially planning to support teachers, many 
of whom had campaigned for them in Tierra Firma. 

So the half-million left over was great! Union and teachers 
were in business! 

Me too, I figured, abandoning summertime completely. 
I began to talk on the phone a lot, and with some pleasure, 
two weeks before school started. 

Abruptly, the tone of these calls changed. What? The sons 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 147 

of bitches ... we knew . . . too good to be true . . . can't 
trust . . . goddammit! 

What went wrong? The president of the old, evil board 
had once been overheard (it was reported) to say, going into 
negotiations, Let's go tease the teachers! The new, good 
board had changed all that, we figured. 

All of a sudden, the phone said, the board took it all back. 
They rehired all directors and supervisors and principals. 
They said they couldn't give the money for salaries, since 
they were afraid they would go bankrupt if they did. They 
allowed as how they'd probably have to lay off teachers. One 
week later, everything had changed. 

Holy Christ! said the phones. What went wrong? Well, 
these decisions had been made on Dave's recommendations. 
The board had apparently forgotten that one of the wrongs 
they planned to right included Dave. They considered him 
to be a villain, a puppet of the old board. They hoped to fire 
him. Thus, perhaps they remembered that if Dave recom- 
mended these moves, sensible as they seemed, the moves must 
be wrong. In the meantime the business manager had quit 
(in a conflict with Dave, everyone said) and so the budget 
was being made and approved and figured out by Dave too, 
and so the board remembered again that they didn't trust 
Dave, who they decided probably wanted the district to go 
bankrupt so the new, good, reform board would look bad. 
Since they had no expertise or even the slightest idea about 
the budget themselves, they had no place to go, no way to 
turn. 

Note that earlier "hereinafter." I have become a school- 
house lawyer. I have a different kind of call. It is from an 
upset teacher, who has been told that she is being summarily 
transferred. No one ever wants to be transferred. 

Who told her this? Well, the principal, of course. Princi- 
pals still tend to forget our contract, or hope we'll forget, one 
or the other. They prefer to just say. You go and You stay 



148 Collective Bargaining 

without reference to our legal, signed, rather complex (they 
say) but fair (we say) procedures for transferring teachers. 

I call the principal. He's already at school working (and 
transferring people) according to his contract. We've still 
got another week. What's this? I want to know. He's surprised 
that there is a problem. I get the notion that he feels I'm but- 
ting into his business at his school with his teachers. We go 
over the question of transfers. He's a sensible guy, and doesn't 
cause any trouble. OK, he says, I know it. I just thought that 
I could transfer her because she wouldn't complain. 

Well, she did complain, I say. We agree to work it out. No 
problem, I tell the teacher. Three days later she calls to tell 
me she wants to transfer after all. She doesn't want the 
principal to be mad at her, because he might harass her. No, 
he won't, I say. The union . . . etc. She goes anyway. The 
next call is from another teacher who says he heard that the 
teachers of that building, all with phones, say that the union 
let one of their colleagues be transferred unfairly! 

Hell! School hasn't even begun! I give up and go to the 
school board meeting. It's only three days (not counting the 
weekend) before school starts up. Board members are arguing 
about rehiring resource and ESL and Title This-and-That 
teachers before final funding by the state or the feds. What 
if we go bankrupt? some say. We have to have these programs 
by law! others recall. What to do? Wait for funding. But 
school begins Tuesday! 

I remind the board they wait too long every year to rehire 
the teachers, that every year the funds come in as promised, 
that every year the board members then complain that these 
programs didn't get started in time. Why not try it the other 
way around for once? I say. Well, that is just the union talk- 
ing, which doesn't care if the district goes bankrupt and cer- 
tainly doesn't have the responsibility, I'm informed. 

I'm still out here with Billie Jean and the pool and the 
warm weather (twenty degrees warmer than Tierra Firma, 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 149 

although only thirty miles away) but I drive in again to talk 
to Dave. We've always gotten along very Avell in our union/ 
superintendent relationship. He's proud of the fact that 
we've had no official grievances, that we've worked them out 
together, no Unfair Labor Practices, no slowdowns, informa- 
tional picketing, or like troublesome activities. I feel that 
Dave, although hiding money in the budget all the time, has 
come through with the money in the end, by some timetable 
of his own that I don't have to understand. Now Dave is even 
coming close to being known as the teachers' friend, he be- 
lieves. Well, I observe to myself that he has a long way to go; 
our memories are long. Also, the new board is or was sup- 
posed to be good, making Dave, a product of the old, no- 
good board, bad all over again. 

Dave is suing the new, good board, he tells me, swearing 
me to secrecy. What for? For not following my recommenda- 
tions, he says. It's against the law! He goes on to explain why. 

What about this money? I say. Goddammit it, Dave, what 
about the half-million? 

He tells me it's needed to balance next year's budget. He 
tells me what a jerk the old business manager was. I'm be- 
ginning to feel nervous. This ain't going to work out nicely. 

I tell Dave he's got to come through with the money. I 
figure he will, as usual, in a while. Well, I try to believe that. 

Before the next board meeting, the phone rings a hundred 
times to tell me the secret: Dave is suing the board! At the 
board special meeting, however, the board is back discussing 
the gardening contract, still under suspicion, and their prob- 
lems with classified employees and their union about who is 
to clean out gutters before the rains come and flood every- 
thing. None of this is new. 

Bottled water is now under discussion. One board member 
claims that if the administration building is to have bottled 
water, then the schools must have it too. 

I think fieetingly of the life expectancy of bottled water 



150 Collective Bargaining 

on its little stand in Spanish Main Junior High. One year, 
long ago, we experimented with a pay phone in the cafeteria. 
Once again with a jukebox. Ten minutes, they lasted. Maybe 
fifteen seconds for bottled water . . . 

I write a note to the school whose teachers claimed the 
union was letting them be transferred unfairly. We can't have 
this going around, especially since it's not true. I remem- 
bered that these teachers at this school mostly don't even be- 
long to the union, don't pay dues. Naturally, they complain 
and naturally are ignorant. 

I get a call from the board's negotiator. She calls from a 
place four hundred miles away. Her name is Candace. 

"Call me Candy," she says, very friendly. 

OK. I suggest we begin negotiating right away, settle this 
problem of money — a minor one, I imply — and get to work 
on our new, three-year contract. I foresee no difficulties, I 
say. 

The board has not instructed her to negotiate, she tells me, 
coldly. Besides, she is off to North Dakota or somewhere on 
business. 

The next day I get a letter from Call-Me-Candy saying that 
the board is making a last and final offer, which is just a 
bonus. Pennies! Not on the salary schedule! I write back, 
outraged; I explain our position in the county (bottom). I de- 
clare she can't give us an ultimatum without ever seeing us, 
the budget, without ever meeting ... I mention unfair la- 
bor practices. 

The rest of our negotiating team is equally outraged. 
We've been sitting around for some time, hearing negotia- 
tors tell us they "have no instruction." We show figures, 
we've analyzed the budget, we have graphs, scattergrams, we 
know the salaries of every other district in sight, we've done 
our homework, we have this signed pledge, we have the end- 
ing balance, we know the state has handed out a 6 percent 
cost-of-living-adjustment for next year (and I'm reduced to 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 151 

talking like that, in terms of COLAs and such!), and by 
God . . . 

By God. We're not putting up with it. We call the news- 
papers. We meet together and drive each other crazy with 
the question, What are we going to do? 

There are Arpine, Gary, Dolly, Karen, and Dorothy. Our 
anger at the negotiator and the new, good board gets turned 
against each other. Why don't I do something? Protest! Or- 
ganize demonstrations! Call the governor. Sick-outs! Slow- 
downs! 

We recall the good old days two years ago with Slick, the 
first negotiator for the district. Districts usually hire lawyers 
who specialize in labor relations to negotiate for them. 
Unions usually don't. We do it ourselves, with the aid of 
state field representatives to figure out the parts where the 
lawyer-expert is trying to outsmart us. Maybe we send the final 
contract to our lawyer to take a look at the language, again 
to guard against legerdemain. 

We began to like Slick quite a bit after the 12 percent 
raise, and we could see that he'd helped us out some on the 
contract, reminding us of things we forgot, showing us how 
to write it down so that it meant, legally, what we wanted it 
to mean, at least in places where he didn't care about the 
article in question. It is one of the best contracts in the whole 
state. We called him Slick fondly, and took photographs to- 
gether when we finally came to agreement on the contract 
and got it neatly printed up in a little blue booklet. 

By the next year we were saying Slick in a different tone. 
It took us most of the year to get to our 6 percent, much of 
the time with that damn Slick saying he had "no instruc- 
tion" from the board. It took a long time for Dave to dig out 
the money he'd hidden, and it wasn't enough. Then the 
damn board, the new, good board, reneged on its pledge! We 
wanted Slick to do something about it. We began to think 
fondly of the old, bad board. 

Abruptly, the board too got tired of Slick and wanted to 



152 Collective Bargaining 

fire him, although we never knew why. Perhaps they thought 
once again that he was in league with Dave. Slick, however, 
sent in another man from his firm. 

Mad as we were at Slick, Little John fared worse. He never 
had any instructions! Where Slick would at least pretend to 
blame the board for this (another reason to fire him, per- 
haps) Little John didn't even do that. 

Then too, Little John told us the kind of stories that no 
doubt every negotiator tells, a stock-in-trade, perhaps, perhaps 
page one in the Negotiator's Handbook, but we had already 
heard them from Slick. Heard them, been impressed at first, 
being novices — but we were in our third year at the table, 
we knew it all, and we didn't want to hear these stories again 
from Little John. 

You see, he'd say, this is the analogy. (We immediately 
knew he was going to tell us why the board, with all this ob- 
vious money, couldn't afford a raise.) 

Say you want to buy a car, he went on. 

We groan. Holy Christ, Little John, we already heard that 
one! He goes on. 

Say you want to buy a car, and it costs two hundred dol- 
lars down. All right, say you've got the two hundred. So you 
put the money down, and own the car, but you forgot to al- 
low for the fact that you had to pay the two hundred dollars 
every month! You don't have it every month! You only had it 
the first month. You see? That's the position the board is in. 
They can't pay the raise every month for this year. Don't 
you see . . . what would you do? 

Well fuck it! Gary tells him, driven mad by this. 

We already heard that tale! 

But what would you do then? asks Little John, certain he 
has an airtight case. 

Do? shouts Gary. Do? I'll tell you what — Lll buy the god- 
damn car and if I can't pay for it next month, they can just 
come around and repossess the son of a bitch! That's what 
Ld do! 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 153 

Now we have Call-Me-Candy, whom we haven't even seen, 
giving us this ultimatum. What happened to the good board? 
What happened to good, old Slick, and (now) good, old 
Little John? 

What happened to good, old so-and-so, the former business 
manager who quit? 

What's happening to Dave? Now Dave is retiring, he tells 
me. What? He's not putting up with this crazy school board. 
He doesn't need it, he says. But now the board, who wanted 
to fire Dave, said they did, refuses to let him quit before his 
contract is out in a year or so and they get the D.A. to write 
Dave letters forbidding him to, we hear . . . what the hell 
is going on? 

W^e organize a big demonstration at the board meeting. 
We've got three hundred people there, teachers, parents, 
clerical employees — we make speeches, neatly orchestrated, 
we get in the newspapers: trouble in tierra firma! Nothing 
happens, though. Call-Me-Candy stands pat. The board 
doesn't move. 

We'll recall the assholes! cry teachers. I remember that in 
this town of eighty-five thousand, only eighteen hundred 
voted for the school board. A recall just might not work. Any- 
way, I remind people, most teachers supported these guys 
against the old, bad board. In fact, most of the old, bad board 
were supported by teachers against an earlier old, bad board. 
Who have they got waiting for us next . . . ? Sick-outs, 
slowdowns, picketing, strike! Goddammit, the union is not 
doing anything . . . 

Call-Me-Candy finally meets with us. Perhaps the demon- 
stration worked, perhaps the publicity influenced them. We 
don't know . . . Call-Me-Candy has no new instructions 
from the board. In their meetings, the board is fighting with 
the Personnel Commission. They are discussing the problems 
of gutters. The rainy season is coming, they point out to each 
other. They are not discussing our negotiations. Dave has 



154 Collective Bargaining 

taken his vacation and will take all his sick leave to boot, he 
says. He has some two hundred days of it. We have no 
business manager. Now we have no superintendent. The 
board has no notion of what to do and is not paying any at- 
tention to us anyway . . . 

At the table, Call-Me-Candy begins to tell us a story. It is 
exactly the same story that good old Slick told us at our first 
bargaining session, that good old Little John told us . . . 

Well, this is all interesting no doubt, and perhaps exciting, 
and it continues, even as I write. But wait! We are, all of us, 
schoolteachers, and the funny thing is that school has started 
for another year. 



CHAPTER 



19 



Opening Day 



I began this with a Friday, June 17, the last day of school for 
that year. The school season, like that of baseball, is strictly 
set and once set, can't change. No more times at bat after 
closing day. Off-season — for us, summertime — is to do some- 
thing else; fish, sell real estate, work out, rest injured arms 
and psyches. Very shortly after Labor Day, for us, the season 
will begin all over again. Opening Day it says, right on the 
school calendar. It is September 7. 

Well, what do we do here, now that school is starting once 
again? 

I go get my room key. I receive a lot of other stuff too — I 
get a note from a teacher who is outraged because we aren't 
getting a raise and what is the union going to do about it? I 
get a note from the PTA president. The PTA is thinking 
about taking the board to a grand jury. I get a note from old 
Jerry, now actually back in the classroom — am I going to play 
the football pool again this year? The answers to all these are 
easy — I don't know, OK, go ahead, and yes. 

155 



156 Opening Day 

School has started. The funny thing is that this time we are 
all a little sympathetic toward Him. 

During the summer, and during the past three years, the 
district has been up against it about closing down schools. 
That is the modern thing to do. So we have had people from 
the California State Department of Education and various 
other experts too; we have had district committees, which 
include teachers and administrators and parents and every- 
body to deal with this problem. I have been on two of these 
committees myself. The problem? We got six thousand kids 
and fifteen schools. 

Everyone, every committee, all the State Department of 
Education officials, agree that this won't do. You just can't 
have these little two-hundred-kid schools! Why not? Well, 
costs. Administrative, custodial, utilities . . . no. Have to 
close schools. 

Well, we all got that, and the idea was to close three little 
elementary schools and make Spanish Main into a Middle 
School — so therefore He would have sixth graders here, mak- 
ing a bunch more kids, and then we could free up elective 
teachers, expand the program, and He was ecstatic, but . . . 

But. But the board, confronted in public meetings by par- 
ents who did not want their little neighborhood schools 
closed, chickened out. They decided to forgo the advice of 
all those experts and committees. They didn't close any 
schools. Spanish Main can't, therefore, be a Middle School. 
He is out of business. 

Our schedule is a mess. It is always a mess, with fifty-six 
kids in one social studies class and thirteen in the one next 
door. This year, it is the same, of course, but now we blame 
it on the board, not on Him. As time goes on, we'll blame it 
on Him again, but not right yet. 

But I go down to my classroom. Room 33. Inside it, I close 
the door, and all of the above, most every concern brought 
up in this book, falls away. 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 157 

I look around. There are thirty-five desks. They are all 
clean. The floor shines, having been worked on during the 
summer. I take a look at the darkening curtain. Well, no, 
still ripped, as it's been for ten years. How about the foun- 
tain? Well, again no, just drips out a drop. 

I go around and open closet doors. The books are there, 
just as Andy put them. Printed maps, left over, are there. I 
remind myself to order more, right today. 

Sitting there in this vacant room, looking out at the grass — 
one solitary black-and-white cat sits over a gopher hole, wait- 
ing — I am very content. 

Why am I content? Well, I just am. I am like every other 
schoolteacher, I think. I am in this room, it is my room, it'll 
do, and, as I start to think about what I'll do this coming 
year, I realize, with much pleasure, that I know what I'm 
doing here. 

I know what I'm going to do. 

No kidding! Know what you're going to do? Given all the 
complications you've written about, the furor, the plans, the 
upsets, the wrongs, the problems, the idiocies, the state of 
the nation, the world. . . ? You know what to do? 

Certainly. We all do. We teachers. We public-school teach- 
ers. We plan to teach school. 

I admit that now, sitting here in Room 33, that maybe 
it is just now, this moment, that I take a look and regard 
myself as a schoolteacher. It's a description which is hard to 
avoid. I have worked here at Spanish Main since 1960. Every 
day, each year, since then. I know that when I write — I know 
that when I sit around and think or talk — that I have thought 
of myself as a musician or a fisherman or a ballplayer or, 
perhaps, just a man-about-town. Fact is, that I don't have to 
worry, really, about describing myself anymore. I teach 
school, in Spanish Main Junior High, to seventh graders. I 
have been a schoolteacher. 



158 Opening Day 

Now I sit here and think about social studies. I always 
teach social studies to seventh graders. I disapprove of the 
course. It does not work. Reading and language (which I al- 
ways teach), I think to myself, well, they do work in a sense. 

Seventh-grade social studies is supposed to be about an- 
cient man, from cavemen, say, until Columbus — the works. 
Plus geography, principally that of the Middle East. 

I myself have some interest in the subject. I know about 
Mr. Leakey. I love seeing Jane Goodall's film about the 
chimps. I've read and reread Konrad Lorenz. The kids do 
not seem, in seventh grade, to share this interest, 

I'm going to figure it out this time, I tell myself. At the 
same time, I start to think about the school itself — it may be 
because I've just written all these pages about schools. I do 
take a look at it. 

What in the world is so bad about this joint? I find myself 
saying. The rooms are big, roomy, we have this black-and- 
white cat outside. We have a good, big multiuse room where 
the kids eat lunch (many of them on our revisionist free 
lunch, of course). If they don't serve Spanish rice, they serve 
nachos. 

If my curtain is ripped, the fact is we can still show Jane 
Goodall and the Chimps. 

We have two huge art rooms. The people teaching this 
art know what they are doing, and they have paper, paints, 
clay, and pottery wheels and they can make prints and they 
have more stuff around for kids to use than the young Picasso 
ever had. 

The library is right across from me. They have some 
twenty thousand volumes in it. We have had a series of smart 
librarians over the years and thus the library contains not 
only hundreds of kids' books but encyclopedias, magazines, 
big illustrated history books, wonderful biographies, every 
classic book ever written ... a wealth of stuff is there. 

The shops. Two great rooms, a hundred thousand dollars' 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 159 

worth of equipment, smart guys who know how to operate 
it — you could build a house with this stuff, and we have guys 
who can show you how to do it, should you want to. 

Two huge grassy fields. 

Besides, in the library — it's modern times — we got cassette 
viewers and what-all. We've got computers, and we got com- 
puter teachers. 

We have basketballs and baseballs and footballs and vol- 
leyballs and even soccer balls — an un-American sport of which 
I disapprove, but we have them. We have Gary, who played 
with Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, to teach these sports, plus 
Beth to teach dance or aerobics or whatever is called for in 
that line. We have tennis courts . . . 

Of course, we have textbooks. My eye falls on the hateful 
seventh-grade social studies text, as I poke around in the 
closets. This book was the result of a teacher-admin com- 
mittee, just as the book says. It is beneath contempt. 

When I was in seventh gxade, I tell myself, we had a book 
about Egypt by Breasted, a certified big-shot academic. The 
progressive movement was in charge. Now I have this text, 
this outrage, and I'm supposed to use it. 

This book likes to tell about how Neanderthal man was a 
wonderful ecologist. 

This book likes to talk about Egyptian culture, but fails 
to mention either hieroglyphics or embalming, let alone the 
Book of the Dead. Slaves were treated there, it points out, 
probably better than some people in some countries today. 

The ancient Hebrews get some mention as land-use ex- 
perts. The Old Testament is not brought up. 

What do I want to do with this bloody social studies class? 
I begin to think about looking out the window and we'll see 
the cat there and envision fifteen or so of us, naked as jay- 
birds, looking around for something to eat (first of all, the 
kitty) and . . . well, I've done all that. Concepts, get across 
the idea that there was a time . . . and then there was a 



160 Opening Day 

time . . . people learned how to grow their own food . . . 
settled down there in Ur or Jericho . . . 

Whether or not we learned more from Breasted than these 
kids will from this? Well, at least we'll do geography. I can 
get maps. The atlases though, good, big paperback atlases, 
Hammond's Historical Atlases, are about gone. I've had them 
some fifteen years, bought with Rabbit Mountain (alterna- 
tive) money back then. The district's sixteen-million-dollar 
budget cannot afford fifty dollars' worth of atlases. We'll 
make another map then, a big, colored map and draw on it 
the principal rivers, the mountain ranges, the seas, locate the 
old towns, Carthage, Ur, Babylon, Alexandria, Troy, Samar- 
kand . . . Knossos . . . 

The year's lesson now planned, I can sit back and take it 
easy. We can trace Odysseus' voyage, we can ... 

Check the dictionaries. Plenty of new ones, but I prefer 
Thorndike's. Thorndike, another old progressive, tried to 
give definitions for words that the kid looking up the word 
might possibly be able to imderstand. The other dictionary 
defines "lust" as "a propensity to venery." 

Of course, Thorndike's kids' dictionary doesn't bring up 
"lust" at all. What it does, though, is give derivations. I had 
a lot of fun with derivations myself in school, and so of course 
will force my students now to have a lot of fun with them too. 

There are still thirty-three Thorndikes. With luck, that'll 
be enough for one more year. 

You see? We, the teachers, know what to do. 

I think about the school itself, again. No household, at 
least none in Tierra Firma, has got these books, these art 
materials, these basketballs, these grassy fields, these com- 
puters, this library, these maps, these Thorndikes. . . . And 
what about music? Haven't we got this great music room, 
haven't we got a great music teacher, haven't we got flutes 
and saxophones, both tenor and alto, clarinets, French horns, 
trumpets, trombones, haven't we got oboes? Guitars? Got 
them all, there for the taking and using? Haven't we got 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 161 

drums? Has any family in Tierra Firma got them all? And 
have they got a teacher? Have they got this sheet music? These 
music stands, or microphones? 

Can you come here as a kid and learn anything? It looks 
to me as though you could come here as a twelve-year-old kid 
in the seventh grade and learn just about anything you 
wanted to learn. You could learn basketball, soccer, the clas- 
sics, Spanish, geography, computers; how to play the oboe, 
learn to draw, paint, and use the potter's wheel; how to use 
the library; certainly learn to diagram sentences, take notes, 
write essays and book reports; you could read Treasure Island 
even if you didn't have it at home. Little Women, The Diary 
of Anne Frank, Helen Keller — we have this stuff, and we, the 
teachers, know about it and you can learn about all this and 
plenty else, right here. 

We are good enough. The school is good enough. Mathe- 
matics? You can learn here to add and subtract if, somehow, 
you didn't get it before; we got people here who can teach 
you algebra should that be what you want or need to know. 
Geometry? Sure thing. 

I poke around a bit more in the closets. I have, maybe, 
five hundred paperback books of all sorts. I see Howard Fast, 
I see Chicano Cruz, I see Olympic Heroes, I see Johnny 
Wooden' s Basketball Secrets, I see The Trojan War and 
Legends of Hercules, and Poe's stories, including "The Pit 
and the Pendulum" . . . 

I see a good stock of three-holed, blue-lined paper (the 
margin line is red) and of plain, white ditto paper for draw- 
ing maps (or for just drawing) or even for making dittos from 
about vocabulary and those derivations. I have masking tape, 
a stapler (and staples), marking pens, roll slips, and Progress 
Reports aplenty, and a listing of films from the County Film 
Library, which means that the county will deliver, once again 
weekly, Jane Goodall, The Gold Bug, The Lottery, and Ishi 
in Two Worlds at my request . . . 

To go along with all this stuff, I have class lists of twelve- 



162 Opening Day 

and thirteen-year-olds who will come in this very room, like 
it or not, right after Labor Day. Two groups; one for reading 
and language, first and second periods. Twenty-eight kids — 
not so bad. Thirty-six for social studies, third period. Not so 
good. That is the top allowed in the contract, but you are 
supposed to begin with fewer, thirty-three, to allow for 
"emergencies." Emergencies are not supposed to come about 
on the first day. Well, some may not show up. The names, 
anyway, are three-quarters Hispanic but I know that many of 
these Spanish names will belong to Filipino kids, along with 
others named Madayag, Manansala, Madarang. Anh-Phuong 
Le, several Lees, some Wongs, two Japanese, a scattering of 
Johnsons and Martins and Richardses. I know, too, that a 
couple of the Hispanic boys will be cholos and wear earrings 
and shave their heads and wear hair-nets, out of a belief com- 
mon in the San Jose barrio that their hair will thus grow out 
straight and look Indian instead of Mediterranean, but that 
otherwise these colorful groups will get along pretty well 
without any great racist divisions, these little kids having 
made, somehow, a great deal of progress along those lines 
in the last ten years or so without any of us — certainly not I — 
having any idea about how this was achieved . . . but I do 
know that that, specifically, is a part of this combat against 
ignorance, and superstition. 

I look down the list for Samoans; things won't be exactly 
right without Samoan youth here. OK! Yeoman. Yeoman! 
Christian! I turn off the light, leave the room, lock the door. 
Lessons all planned for the year, my mind turns to Mutiny 
on the Bounty . . . I'll look in the faculty room, now, get 
coffee, see my colleagues, all armed with class lists, lessons 
planned, strategies mulled over, shiny classroom floors, clean 
desks, reams of three-holed, blue-lined paper . . . 

So with all this stuff, these books, those films, basketballs, 
class lists, teachers, and so on, then why doesn't this school 
work? 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 163 

It does work! I say. 

Well, it don't work too good! 

I begin the old arguments all over to myself. Now look, I 
say, if you really wanted to think up the worst possible situa- 
tion in which to "learn" things, in which to concentrate on 
a problem or on a story, understand something like evolu- 
tion, remember the name Agamemnon, the worst possible 
way to go about these things, then what you would do is get 
together some thirty twelve-year-olds and put them in a room 
together, just as, in fact, American public schools do now and 
have done forever and will go on doing . . . 

Given that impossible situation, we, teachers, are here to 
combat ignorance and superstition, and we'll combat them. 
If we never win any outright victory, it is also clear that we 
can't lose, can't be totally defeated. Here the race is to the 
swift and the slow and those (most of us) in between. What 
we are going to do, all of us in there in Room 33 on Tuesday 
after Labor Day, is live our lives there, under certain cir- 
cumstances, just as we will always do, in and out of school, 
either alone, reading Mutiny on the Bounty, or together with 
thirty others deciding whether to do our derivations or 
sabotage the fountain . . . 

It works! I mutter to myself . . . just as being alive 
works . . . 

Goddammit! A colleague is examining the bulletin board. 
I've got yard duty the first week! Morning duty too, the one 
I hate most of all, and He knows it! 

It don't work too good! . . . yeah, but it. . . . No. Enough 
for now. . . . 



Epilogue: Swan Song 



In another summertime, I rented a beach house near the vil- 
lage of Bolinas, and each morning I took Jay and Jack down 
to fish for perch and shiners in the channel, play in the boats, 
roam the beach. I myself went up to spend some time in 
Smiley's Bar-and-Bait-Shop School. 

The school itself, like all schools, had plenty of administra- 
tors, teachers, and professors. It had visiting scholars like my- 
self. It had shaky professors emeritus, especially evident in the 
morning. A well-rounded curriculum was presented, from 
the life histories of the administration to the ingratitude of 
children, from the world-record rosetail perch (seven and 
one-quarter pound! said Harry the chancellor) to the possible 
hippie invasion of northern California (They ain't a hippie 
within a hundred mile of here! said Fred, a chief adminis- 
trator). 

The subject, this one morning that I remember — I seem 
to be at the stage where one says, remember clear as day — the 
subject was the decline of striped-bass fishing in the Bolinas 
channel. The channel was famous for that fishery each sum- 
mer; in fact, none presently were being caught. Lectures 

164 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 165 

were being given to explain it; pollution, sea lions, the 
A-bomb tests, pesticide, fluoridation. 

Suddenly, one young man, a teaching assistant, one imag- 
ines, full of psychedelic screwdrivers, confronted us with the 
brilliant theory that no striped bass were being caught be- 
cause no one was fishing for them! No one, he shouted, cap- 
tivating us with his logic, was fishing because none were being 
caught! Since no one was fishing, he cried, had not been fish- 
ing for two weeks, we all assumed that there was no run of 
striped bass in the channel! How did we know? Sitting there 
in Smiley's Bar-and-Bait-Shop School, how did ive know that 
there was not a secret striped-bass run going on in the chan- 
nel, right now? 

Well, Smiley's was a good school, I thought. After that lec- 
ture, most of us went off to keep office hours elsewhere. (And 
if there was no Smiley in sight, what did that matter? There 
was no George Washington or Benjamin Franklin in sight at 
most schools either.) 

Still, the thing which really made Smiley's a good school 
was that there were no students. No youth. There were no 
kids. A benevolent government had made them illegal. The 
teachers were able, thus, to teach without disruption. The 
administration's rules were followed, lest one be eighty-sixed, 
or required to pay one's bar bill. 

I think that it can be easily shown why youth, students, and 
kids detract from the Good School. For the one error made 
by the founders of Smiley's Bar-and-Bait-Shop School was to 
have created the bait shop. In the midst of the decline in 
striped bass, it still sold hooks, leaders, bait, sinkers, and line, 
to everyone. I recall when the school met its match — recall 
it clear as day — by the Coming of the Kid. 

This one morning, only Chancellor Harry and I are pres- 
ent. Harry visibly needs time to get ready for the day. His 
hands seem to shake. He makes himself a screwdriver, and 
only then gets me my beer. I understand; Smiley's School 
holds Adult Education classes in the evening too. I person- 



166 Epilogue: Swan Song 

ally never attend, but obviously it is a long, hard day for the 
top administration. 

We sit. I have the sports page. Harry has his screwdriver 
and his head. Suddenly, Harry wheels around, looks out the 
blue-tinted window. He has heard something; I see that he 
suspects something is happening that no good school should 
have to endure! 

He comes back to whisper to me. Oh, Lord have mercy, 
man, here comes the fucking kid! 

The coming of a student, a kid, is at least troublesome for 
all schools. At most, it is a disaster. We can hear the Kid 
come in through the bait-shop door. The bait-shop counter 
comes just up to the half wall dividing the room, and so we 
can't see him. He is there though, waiting. 

Harry's mouth pulls down in a spasm. I ask him, hurriedly, 
for another beer. He gives it to me, gratefully, but then 
draws himself up and marches with set face around the 
corner to the bait shop. Harry is courageous. 

I listen. Nothing happens. Then I hear Harry say. You 
want something. Kid? The Kid mumbles. Then nothing. 
Then again, I hear Harry say. Well, if you make up yore 
mind you want something, you call me, I can't just stand 
here forever, you know! 

Back in the bar, we wait. We both know that the Kid is 
still out there. I can see Harry's head hurting. I am in good 
shape; as a visiting professor, I don't have to deal with stu- 
dents. Still, we wonder, why can't the Kid come by at three 
in the afternoon instead of early in the morning, when all 
Harry wants is peace and quiet, aspirin, a drink, and time 
to think? 

I decide to get out of here. But Harry gives us both a beer 
and then marches resolutely over to the bait shop. He is 
going to get it over with. 

One hook, I can hear the Kid say. I imagine Harry sighing 
with relief. He can handle that one. 

One hook? says Harry. Sure! I hear him rattling around 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 167 

boxes of hooks and sinkers, lures. Here you are, Kid! Ten 
cents. 

All I can hear is a mumble from the Kid. 

What do you mean, you don't want that kind? Harry's 
voice is shrill. He's starting too soon, I know from experi- 
ence. That's the only kind I got. 

The Kid knows better. Kids always know better. 

Yeah, well, oh those, says Harry. Them snelled hooks. Sure 
I got those, but they come six to a pack. Thirty cents! 

Mumble. 

Yeah, naw, but we don't sell just one of them! We only 
sell these others one at a time. You want one? 

Mumble. 

I listen. Chancellor Harry is too eager to get it over with. 
It's really tragic. 

He goes on. Buy these hooks! Dime apiece! These are 
Eagle Claw hooks! Damn good hooks! I caught many a fish 
on them hooks! 

M-m-m-m-m. The other guy . . . says the Kid. 

Yeah, but I don't care about no other guy! What other 
guy? No, he didn't tell you that, either. Also, they ain't no 
other guy! Don't come in here and lie to me! Buy these 
snelled hooks by the pack, cheaper; you only got a dime, buy 
this one! 

M-m-m-m-m; these other kind. 

But I already told you! Look, you got thirty cents? Buy 
these! 

Mumble. 

Then buy this one for a dime! How come you need a hook 
anyway? 

Oh, boy. I recognize that Harry has just lost. I had been 
in the same position many times. Never say to a student, How 
come? You are bound to lose. 

Look, Kid, says Harry, you lost yore hook, you got it 
snagged on rocks and seaweed and mess and you gonna lose 
more hooks! Don't tell me you ain't! Look, Kid, what's it 



168 Epilogue: Swan Song 

gonna be? I ain't got all day. I got work to do . . . look Kid, 
buy the one, I'll even tie it on for you, is that the problem? 
You don't know how to tie it on? Listen, Kid, I'm not 
gonna . . . 

I have concentrated on the sports page, like any good 
teacher. Let this cup pass from me, I pray, and I read for the 
second time about the Giants' thrilling battle for fourth 
place. When I come to, Harry is back behind the bar. 

How did it come out, Harry? I ask. I imply that, as a mem- 
ber of the staff, I have a right to know. 

What? says Harry. Oh, you mean the Kid? Well, he left 
about five minutes ago. 

Yeah, but what happened? 

Harry would like to ignore this question. I understand 
that, but I need to know. With the hooks, Harry, I say. 

Oh. Well, you heard the little bastard. Today it's one 
hook. Fine. But before it was one bait shrimp — you ever try 
to pry loose one shrimp from a pack of frozen shrimp? — and 
before that it was a piece of line this long off a thousand-yard 
spool of Dacron which he planned to buy for one cent and 
before that . . . Harry gets up and paces the length of the 
bar — hell, man, I can't stand there all day arguing with that 
little . . . 

So what happened, Harry? I am inexorable. 

And so, hell, I broke open the fucking pack of snelled 
hooks and gave him one! Jesus, if my head would just let 
up . . . 

I say nothing, but I wait. 

I'll throw his ass right out, next time! says Harry. 

No doubt. Silence from me. 

So I give him the snelled hook for a nickel! 

Harry has returned to his seat, and looks out the blue win- 
dow. 

Give it to him for a nickel, and threw in a free one extra! 
And then he finally left! 



NOTES FROM A SCHOOLTEACHER 169 

That very evening I went out alone to the channel and 
walked the edge of the water, and about six, I saw the giant, 
brown pelicans wheeling and lurching through the air like 
kites and then, wham! or blooie! they dove or fell (if you've 
ever seen the beautiful pelicans' ungainly dive) and I unlim- 
bered my rod and tied on my pretty feathered jig and cast it 
in a marvelous arc out into the channel where the pelicans 
were sitting or diving into the water, feeding. I knew that 
the pelicans were feeding on bait fish, and I knew that the 
secret striped bass were there, chasing those bait fish, and I 
knew that I was the only fisherman on the beach, and I knew 
that I had learned this from school. 

I cast and cast into the glassy evening sea, into the glorious 
orange sunset, casting like a god, perfectly, without any back- 
lash and without snagging the jig in kelp or rocks, bouncing 
the lure off those pelicans' backs time after time, causing 
pelican uproars, and I cast for an hour or so without any 
strike at all. 

There were no secret striped bass in the channel. 



ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

James Herndon is the author of The Way It Spozed 
to Be and How to Survive in Your Native Land. 
He lives in California, where he has been a class- 
room teacher for more than twenty years. He is also 
the head of his local teacher's union. 



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